5 ms·
> Apple is too expensive Is it? You can get an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $699 now. That's more than many of the bottom-of-the-barrel Windows machines out t
by presbyterian 1y ago
> Apple is too expensive
Is it? You can get an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $699 now. That's more than many of the bottom-of-the-barrel Windows machines out there, but it's not an unreasonable price at all. It'll keep away the lowest-end users, but most of those users 1) are not going to care about the security issues, because they don't know anything about computers beyond base utility, and 2) have mostly switched to doing everything on their phone/tablet, and aren't as big of the computer demographic these days anyway.
- Almondsetat 1y ago$699 for a computer that will stop getting updates in just a few years
- copperx 1y agoThat's about 6 years. Plenty enough for a laptop that's not upgradeable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoFor some perspective: Computer Shopper 1993 GW2K 386SX at $1300. Today that is $2800. That $699 Mac is getting you a machine that would have been a TOP500 supercomputer in the 90s.
- throitallaway 1y agoIf my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike. Yes, things change over time. I cringe to think of what some of the original 42" flat screen displays cost relative to the huge (much better looking) OLED panels of today.
- lxgr 1y agoAnd your credit card has a more powerful computer than the Apollo lunar lander. But software development (for both OS and applications) is continuing in parallel with hardware improvements, so there's a strong implicit demand of you to also continue upgrading, at least if you need to interoperate with any other computer in the world.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThe $699 MacBook Air has 8GB of RAM. That's hardly enough now, much less if you plan to keep it for a few years. Which hardly matters when you can get 64GB of DDR5 to put in it for less than $100. Except that it isn't upgradable.
- jonfw 1y ago8GB of RAM w/ swap on SSD is just fine for most use cases
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoNo it isn't, and doing that will chew up your SSD. Which on that MacBook Air is soldered.
- lurking_swe 1y agoThe answer is it depends i think… If your SSD is near its max-capacity, then any extra wear has a bad affect on its longevity. But modern SSD’s handle excess writes very well if they are not near capacity. A few extra GB written to disk daily is a drop in the bucket in an SSD’d TBW rating, no?? I’d say for a casual user with low storage needs, it’s perfectly fine. Otherwise it’s a bad idea imo.
- keyringlight 1y agoWhat's telling for me is that SSDs have been a readily available consumer part for around 15 years now, a default option in PCs for quite a while now, and to my knowledge there hasn't been many tales of SSDs dying (specifically for write endurance or otherwise) beyond occasional bad models like the old OCZ vortex2s. Even early torture tests were finding that you'd need to push around 2PB of writes (on smaller drives than we have now) to get failures, and that was on a sample size of 1 for each model. I wouldn't expect a SSD to die more than any other electronics.
- 1y ago
- bobajeff 1y agoNo, $699 is too much. That being said price isn't the only thing that keeps me away from Apple. They are beautiful systems but very annoying to use IMO. Speaking as a long time Linux user who occasionally helps people with their computer problems (Mac and Windows).