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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Apple is a strange choice as a champion for that. Their devices always have been notoriously overpriced.
I disagree. They don’t offer a low-end option, but their devices are fairly priced for what you get. People keep claiming they are overpriced but when you ask them for a cheaper alternative they always respond with something not even remotely comparable.
Yet, no one offers anything comparable for less.
Have you looked? I mean, that question is rhetorical... No, you haven't.
You should check out the competition. Samsung makes some great devices, razer makes some great devices. Even Google makes solid competition, though I prefer others over them.
Of course. Name one manufacturer that makes anything comparable to a MacBook Pro with M1
Unfortunately, I have intimate experience with all of those and more. I’m a mobile developer, we buy a lot of phones for testing purposes. We literally have an entire closet full of phones, every even remotely popular model, we’ve got it.
The stuff I’m working on is quite demanding, think computer vision related. We have to make it work on both iOS and Android and the latter is quite a pain in the ass. Device fragmentation is a bitch and performance is significantly below that of iOS devices, even on the high-end models (and we also have to support the low-end stuff). So on Android we have to choose less advanced algorithms, process at a lower internal resolution and frame rate, stuff like that.
I wish Android manufacturers got their shit together and catch up to Apple. It would make my life so much easier if they did, but for now there is a pretty big performance gap.
Compared to MacBook m1 pro, there are plenty of better options. Asus zephyrus lineup for example.
Yes, the m1 has less bugs with peripherals and software than the 2019 MacBook pro, but it is still an absolute pain to use for software dev
Is this really the hill you want to die on?
You’re saying they should have included the stand and raised the price of the monitor by $1k ?
The target audience for this monitor usually doesn’t need a stand, so it makes sense to sell it separately.
The stand costs like 15$ to produce (including machine time, material cost and shipping) I bet you can find dozens of chinese clones for under 100$ that function equally as well or better.
I can't relate to the value you place in them. You couldn't pay me to use Apple software.
With Windows or Linux, I spend a lot of my time operating the computer. On macOS I just spend my time on the tasks I was working on. The nice thing about Apple’s software is that it gets out of the way so you can focus on what actually matters.
That's only true if the Apple way works for you. If not it keeps getting in the way in infuriating ways.
I once bought an apple laptop, it lasted a couple months before I ran back to the comfort and productivity of Linux and kde.
It can take a bit of getting used to. The main thing I had to unlearn is expecting things to be complicated, when they aren’t.
That's debatable. And uncomplicated, assuming that it is, still didn't mean comfortable.
This can be absolutely true the other way around too, depending on how proficient you are, and what you are used to or find intuitive. For me, macOS is extremely unintuitive, for example, while my fully personalized Linux setup allows me to do what I want. It is very subjective, ultimately.
I’m very proficient in Linux. I used to run it as a desktop about 15 years ago, before I was able to afford a Mac. Still run it on the server, both personally and professionally. It’s come a long way, but it’s not nearly as polished as macOS.
A desktop linux user is not someone "very proficient"
You ran an install script.
I'm very proficient. It's my career.
It's also part of my career, and has been for the last 15+ years. I mentioned desktop use because that was way more challenging back then than it is today. I first started using Linux personally in '98 with S.u.S.E. 5.3, then moved to using it as my main OS about a year later. Damn, that's 25 years.... in my mind it feels less. I must be getting old. Used it in a professional capacity on the server since graduation.
Polished doesn't mean functional or ergonomic, which is something I value a lot. The ability to customize what I want easily is also something that Linux offers much more directly than macOS (which is the definition of getting in the way).
Again, I totally believe that for someone the Mac experience can be superior, but it depends on preference, use, habits and priorities.
What would you need to customize? IMO if you need to customize stuff that’s a failure. It should be right out of the box.
I want to customize all the keybindings for workspaces, since I want to create my own workflow. I think different people have different preferences. I am not looking for an out-of-the-box experience, but a setup I can make mine and opinionated. That's what I mean that it depends on personal requirements too.
I can image that's how it would be for many people.
I enjoy learning how to operating the computer but I've also become convinced software freedom aught to be valued the most.
4 years on macbooks as a software dev. Haven't seen a more annoying OS for power users than OSX. The Apple software is constantly in the way, breaking things or crashing because you plugged in a non apple certified keyboard.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand
I think it's hilarious that you show proof of how overpriced Apple products are and there are still fanboys that down vote you.
Which apple product doesn't have a chaper alternative?
All of them. Every cheaper alternative is just a crappier product that cheaper because it’s simply not as good.
I'll take my Garmin over you apple toys any day
Can a Garmin even run apps? It’s a completely different product.
There's been a Garmin app store for twice as long as Apple has been making watches.
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/
It's not at all a different product. It's a direct competitor who makes a superior product.
Again -- I've had a smart watch that does all the shit apple watch does, for half a decade before apple even thought about it. And mine can go a month without charging.
Define superior. Only Apple makes Smartwatch SoCs with any kind of decent performance, other manufacturers like Qualcomm don’t put a lot of effort into the market segment and just put an old CPU core in a low power package and call it a day. It’s simply not profitable enough for them.
I don't give a shit about any of that. It's what the watch DOES, and Garmin does WAY more, for WAY longer.
Garmin does not do way more. Most of their "apps" are just replacement watch faces. Garmin doesn't even try to compete on features, their selling points are battery life, price, and integration with other Garmin fitness accessories. Apple/Google/Samsung watches are so capable they're basically tiny phones.
Like the thousand dollar basic monitor stand?
Or comparing similarly specced macs vs PCs (I bet that's why they moved away from x86 again, because it was too obvious how overpriced they were when the specs could be compared 1:1).
The thousand dollar monitor stand is not a consumer product and simply sold separately because not a lot of people are going to need it. The monitor it’s meant for is actually a lot cheaper than comparable monitors.
In the x86 era similarly specced PCs had similar prices or were even more expensive. The thing about Mac’s is that while you can get a PC that has some better specs for less, you couldn’t get anything that matched all the specs. It may have had a faster CPU, but would come in a crappy plastic case, weigh a ton and run out of battery in 30 seconds. Or it ran forever on a single charge but had a CPU that was slow as molasses.
No, it’s because x86 is an overcomplicated mess with terrible performance/watt. x86 CPUs run hot, drain your battery and still don’t perform great. Apple’s M series SoC’s are amazing. A clean, modern ISA, high IPC, low power usage, low heat. It doesn’t matter if my MacBook Pro (M1 Max )runs on battery or wall power, it’s always blazing fast. It has insane battery life, does not get hot and is completely silent.
I was referring to the desktop space. Apple is a lot more competitive in the laptop space (unless you're a gamer), but their desktop specs always made me laugh at the price they ask for it. Granted, I haven't looked recently, but any time I've looked in the past, their price seems about 1k too high for what they are offering.
But yeah, x86 laptops are generally a shitshow. I had a decent personal one, though that was used more like a very portable desktop than a true laptop. That one just stopped charging one day (though its timing was impeccable because I was already in the process of moving my files to a new desktop I had just built, just had to pull the drives out to get the rest of it). And a cheap one I threw Linux on for school that did the job. But my first work laptop at my current job was garbage and the current one is relatively better, but also has a bunch of issues, enough that I don't think very highly of HP even ignoring their printer bs.
Is that still even a thing? Between hybrid working and flex desking, who still uses desktop PC’s?
Gamers and custom builders. We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.
The very top of personal computing is still desktops. And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package. Custom laptops are becoming more common but the size still limits choices you can make.
Tiny niche market.
We just run all that stuff in the cloud, much easier to scale up and down.
Yeah, but does it matter? You can get a decked out MacBook Pro for less than €5k, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. You can’t bring a desktop computer into a meeting, or to a customer, or home for a work from home day.
For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.
Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.
And that laptop has a similar size, weight build quality, battery life, display resolution/peak brightness,etc ? Or is it a plastic fantastic 'luggable' behemoth that runs out in less than 2 hours and throttles almost immediately under load? Link to that mythical laptop please.
You say that like it's a good thing. Discrete GPUs suck, especially for GPGPU tasks. Not having unified memory is killing for performance in anything but games. Copying data to/from VRAM is slow and discrete GPUs have very limited VRAM. Even a 4090 only has 24GB. Meanwhile you can spec out an M2 MacBook with 96GB RAM and have almost all of that available to the GPU.
They notoriously sell older components and technologies in their brand new computers.
I have one I got for free that was made in 2020. It's a MacBook Air. It has 8gb of RAM... I don't even know how they found RAM chips that small in 2020. It freezes every day when all I'm doing is running a web browser. This computer was $1,000 at the time it launched.
Apple also holds over 95,500 patents. I will never get why some people defend this crazy company. They make underperforming computers and sell them for wayyy over their value.