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Say what you will about Apple, but their recent MacBooks have been solid and more affordable than their offerings a decade ago. It’s great to see the prices com
by tnel77 3y ago
Say what you will about Apple, but their recent MacBooks have been solid and more affordable than their offerings a decade ago. It’s great to see the prices come down to a more reasonable level.
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago> It’s great to see the prices come down to a more reasonable level Purchased new, it is a nearly 4 year old laptop after all.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoAs long as they support them 8 or so years that gives you a good 4 years with it for the low low price of $699. Besides, in 4 years, 8GB RAM will not be enough, so it'll be time to upgrade anyway.
- quesera 3y agoApple typically provides parts and support for at least 5 years after sale, regardless of design/tech era. So we'll see how long the M1s are for sale at Walmart or anywhere, but these computers should be supported until 2029.
- superkuh 3y ago8GB of ram is already not enough now.
- tim333 3y agoI'm typing this on an M1 with 8GB and it flies along with very few problems. I'm not sure what application would overload it?
- superkuh 3y agoTry running a browser and adobe creative suite along with a darktable/lighttable. That kind of photography workflow also fills up the tiny available storage really fast so the macs end up being unwieldly octopuses of fragile USB/thunderbolt devices. I don't do it myself, but I do do tech support for them when they go wrong. And usually it's because they run out of the paltry 8GB of ram.
- Damogran6 3y agoThat's not accurate. For an average user 8Gb RAM shared with the GPU and a really fast nVME bus...the RAM is just L4 Cache at this point and there's little to no penalty to using swap like there was with north bridges, south bridges and spinny disks.
- rany_ 3y agoThe only penalty is using up your flash's write cycles; but of course, this works to Apple's favor because it means you'll need to replace this thing sooner when the flash dies. Best part? You can't easily replace the flash because it's soldered to the board.... and the amount of people that could do this repair properly is close to non-existent.
- Damogran6 3y agoEventually...maybe...considering the sectors get flagged and there's spare sectors to be rolled into service...and odds are the battery is the real bottleneck before the Flash becomes an issue.
- rany_ 3y agoYou could replace the battery for under 100 USD, you can't do the same for the flash storage.
- notyourwork 3y agoI have a 13" macbook pro from 2010 that I still use. So even a 4 year old model will be a great device for a lot of use cases.
- wcchandler 3y agoDid you have to swap any hardware to continue using it? I have a 2012 macbook pro but had to install Linux since newer versions of MacOS stopped supporting the underlying hardware.
- wpguy 3y agoI'm using a 2012 macbook pro as well. I put in 16gb of ram but im having a hard time finding a good replacement battery for it.
- yencabulator 3y agomacOS has dropped support for models built in 2017 (and older); for most consumers, using Apple software from the 2010 era is a very bad idea.
- notyourwork 3y agoFor my use case it is perfectly fine but for some its a valid issue.
- catchnear4321 3y agopractically speaking, for the target audience, how much does that actually matter?
- tnel77 3y agoI have an 2013 MacBook Pro with an Intel chip and it’s still chugging along. My wife’s basic Lenovo from 2017 has long since given up on life. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but the longevity of my Mac has really won me over.
- jsheard 3y agoThe base specs are reasonably priced, but the RAM and SSD upgrades are still extortionate. $999 for a MacBook Air? Sure. $800 extra to add 1.75TB more SSD space? You must be joking, that's a ~700% markup over retail SSD prices, which are themselves marked up from the wholesale prices that Apple is paying.
- Xelbair 3y agoWell depends where you live. over here they are roughly 2x as expensive as any other laptop with comparable specs(including screen). If such price point was available in here i would try it.
- ylee 3y ago> Say what you will about Apple, but their recent MacBooks have been solid and more affordable than their offerings a decade ago. It’s great to see the prices come down to a more reasonable level. When I covered IT hardware companies on Wall Street, I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". Around the same time, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".