- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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You know, it’s not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.
Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.
The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.
Samsung’s Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.
The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn’t make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below “relatively high-end”, products in a particular category.
Samsung offers a lot more models so they tend to have a higher high end and a lower low end than Apple.
Can confirm on the MacBook side. My girlfriend got a m series macbook and it’s better than anything in it’s price range. That device is so snappy while having a battery life that’s incomparable to anything with windows
I’ve owned 4 MacBooks. A white plastic one, a 13" MBP, a 15" MBP, and now a 15" M2 Air.
I’ve had the Air for a year and I still can’t wrap my head around how it’s technically in a class below the fully specced 15" 2015 MBP, but outperforms it in literally every way. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that, even without Apple Silicon, computer tech jumped on in leaps and bounds in the 8 years between my last two, but the performance difference is astonishing.
Sure, it’s a lot of money for an ‘entry level’ laptop, but this fucker is going to last me ten years or more. When Apple no doubt drop OS support for it in a few years, Asahi Linux will almost certainly be rock solid enough to fully replace macOS.
It doesn’t even do anything more especially for the price. Just make an AMD rig that blows it outta the water ez.
That aged like milk lol
Before I landed a good job, I was buying used Macs for years. Mac of All Trades is your friend.
Does more, lol. Think Apple might need a dictionary considering iPhone is just barely getting home screen customization and the Mac mouse actively works against doing anything.
Just Capitalism Problems
Think different
The M2 Mac Mini is $599, or $499 if you can get the education discount. There is not a (new) Windows PC in that price range that has the same performance (especially performance-per-watt) and Thunderbolt 4. The M1 MacBook Air is getting a bit old, but it’s on sale for $600-700 pretty often and will knock the socks off most PCs in that price range, especially in build quality.
Apple’s pricing gets ridiculous when you try spec’ing up with certain memory or storage upgrades, sure, and most internal upgrades are a no-go. The base models of most of their computers are incredibly competitive, though.
If I’m buying a Mac personally I always buy a refurbished one. The machine has the same warranty but you save a couple hundred bucks.
Well now I just need apple to provide a real os.
I use Nixos btw.
At 600 you can get a computer with an actual graphics card. The only outstanding feature of the M1/2 macs is the very low power consumption, the rest is quite subpar.
A $600 PC with a dedicated graphics card is probably going to have a worse CPU than an M2 or M3 Mini, and probably no Thunderbolt. You would only be cross-shopping a PC like that with a Mac Mini if you were thinking of graphically-demanding productivity work, like video editing or Blender. If it’s for gaming then the Mac wouldn’t be in the running at all.
Except for their low draw and thus unmatched battery life on portable divides, the M chips are honestly not impressive performance wise. Not really the appeal, even tho Apple is trying tooth and nails to pretend that that’s a selling point with their unlabeled graphs.
I mean if you really don’t want a GPU (which IMO is a must, given proper hardware acceleration which makes up for any CPU short comings, but I digress), that leaves you with a much bigger budget for the CPU, and now it’s no longer close enough to the M chips, but an absolute slaughter.
It’s really up to personal preference but I’m a big fan of the metal unibody of Mac laptops. While my friends’ PC laptops plastic bodies were starting to separate and show wear, my laptop was still looking mint. That alone also helped determine how long I kept a Mac laptop going (I was on a 2017 MBP 13” up to just recently and the body is still near mint).
So while it could be perceived as a simple cosmetic preference, it was also about the longevity of the laptop’s use.
That said, I have an ASUS ROG Zephyrus that has a pretty solid body, despite being plastic. Some of them have gotten better, but a lot are still flimsy crap.
It’s the same reason I prefer the body of my iPhone, vs the multitude of plastic Android flagship phones I churned through back in the day. The G1 still holds a place in my heart though and had a metal body (and I still have it in its original box!)
I don’t want to downplay or invalidate any of your preferences, but you HEAVILY miss represent the competition. Have you seen a non apple device in the past 5 years?
Other companies make metal body PCs now. From the dinky cheap ass laptop I bought just for fun, to my sister’s proper gaming laptop, there’s plenty of metal+glass laptops out there. And when it comes to android I only really follow Samsung, Sony and Google, but at least those 3 have had metal+glass flagship phones since I care to remember. (looked it up, Sony: 2013, Samsung: 2015, Google: 2018)
This post was maybe true 5 years ago, but PC laptops have really started to suck. My macbook air was only $300 and it’s way better than my work’s $1k+ Dell laptop in terms of performance and battery life.
Where is a macbook air $300? Off the back of a truck?
Macbook air is only $300???
Yes. Supplier markup is 50% above cost, so set up a price watch and wait for it to go on clearance. You’ll get it 50% off.
I got mine new at Best Buy last year when they were clearing out M1 stock.
seeing the mac logo im thinking this was when steve jobs was between. Nobody wanted an apple in 1999 and even early 2000’s I remember a guy who used to stick apple stickets on his ibm to deter thieves.
Apple purchased NeXT in 1997. Steve became the i(nterim)CEO shortly after. iMac was first introduced in 1998. Steve was running the show already. That’s around when the logo stopped being multi-colored.
Thanks for the context. One thing I liked about ios was the way it used many next things (that and I was so jacked that it was built on freebsd). They were my favorite machines back in 1994ish. I was aware jobs went from there back to apple but I thought it was more a falling out previous to that. I was a fanboy by 2005 (well as much as Im gonna be about anything) but it only lasted half a decade as the service at the mac store faltered combined with the whole iminmalist thing when I like them due to maximalist.
What’s next? Google becoming evil ?
Impossible, they are so quirky they let their workers play xbox 360 at work, they are surely a good company with good intentions.
Does less
Cost more
Fuck you
Wasn’t that always the case? I mean compared to my IBM PC clone, mine did way more and cost way less. And it was upgradeable. And mine could play games.
But does it have a cool rainbow apple?
Who cares when it could run Doom in full screen?
Gaming aside (though that particular gap is beginning to close) I honestly can’t think of anything I’ve wanted to do with my various Macs over the years that I couldn’t because of macOS.
The closest I can get to is running radio station playout software, but that was less something I needed to do, and more an itch I fancied scratching at that moment. Other than that, my Macs have always had a way to do exactly what I wanted with them.
Pro versions: Does a little more
Costs even more
Fuck you as well
Pro versions: Does a little more
Costs even more
Best regards
idk why you got downvoted i think this was a good iteration
Want wheels sucker?
Original iPod: Clunky, ugly, not the most storage.
But using jt will remind you of playing with nipples.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
I’m sad people downvoted you because they don’t know a fun piece of Internet history
That pin can be found for $30 or $35 on on ebay here and here, where it is described as being from the 80s and as an “employee pin”.
I was thinking that this might have been something aimed specifically at technology buyers in US schools in the 80s or 90s, to whom Apple offered substantial institutional discounts in a (relatively successful) effort to dominate that sector. However searching the phrase “does more costs less” i found this TV spot advertising the Quadra 605 which at $1000 was the cheapest computer Apple sold when it was introduced in October 1993 (and allegedly cheaper than something else they refer to as “PC Leading Brand” 😂). That system was sold under the LC and Performa brands up to 1996, but it was only sold as a Quadra until October 1994, so, to answer OP’s question: that slogan was in use at least sometime in that year.
A study from 2022 found that deploying Macs in the enterprise has a lower TCO than Windows. Mainly because they have to buy less extra software and they don’t need as many IT staff to support them. Also, employees with Macs are more productive and do better on their performance reviews.
I don’t see this mentioned there, but that Apple has largely ignored enterprise works out as a strength; other companies wrote and open sourced pretty good tools. That can result in tools that better meet your needs, and generally will result in a lower TCO.
And since Macs are just UNIX machines under the hood, a lot of those open-source things are already built-in or can be added without much trouble.
Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.
Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.
Depends on the enterprise. If you’re a 1 user to 1 device shop maybe. If you’re an institution with shared devices…good fucking luck, be prepared to enter device management hell
MacOS supports PAM and LDAP just like any enterprise-class UNIX system, as well as lots of enterprise class device management tools such as InTune.
If you know what you’re doing, it’s more manageable than Windows, even.
