It seems that the only viable upgrade path is to convince your employer to stump up the cash.
2300 / 0.73 * 0.86 = ~2710
2300 / 0.73 * 0.95 = ~2993
It would appear that currency fluctuations account for a significant portion of that price difference that you're seeing.
In 2014, a 2300 EUR laptop was 2300 / 0.73 = ~3150 USD or so.
Today, a 3000 EUR laptop is 3000 / 0.86 = ~3500 USD or so.
So no, just the exchange ratio does not explain this. The US inflation numbers, however, say 3150 in 2014 was 3353 USD in 2018 so that's closer.
Apple will give themselves a cushion to prevent undesirable pricing discrepancies (or the need for frequent price adjustments) if the U.S. dollar strengthens against the euro, so a product that they sell at 3150 USD after taxes in the United States would reasonably be in the ballpark of 2800-2900 EUR in Europe given exchange rates in the last year or two. This is rather close to the parent post's stated price even without adjusting for inflation.
Apple is a trillion-dollar company that has people who can and do hedge FX exchange rates on their products to keep costs predictable in local currency terms. As such they don't need a "cushion" - beyond the need to cushion their margins, that is.
(And even if they didn't hedge FX - if they need a cushion now, why didn't they need the same cushion before?)
However I have had no end of issues with my XPS 15. To the point that I have had enough and I am returning it for a refund and will pickup something else. The first unit had physical damage to the lid so I got a replacement sent. The replacement has coil whine, interference on audio out. backlight bleed and the space bar has developed a wobble so does not pick up all presses. For a £2600 that is unacceptable. I know people like to hate on the new MBP keyboards but I have not had a single problem with my 2016 MBP. That machine is basically perfect and I hope/expect the 2018 model to be the same.
To be honest I am fine with pay £700 more for a machine that doesn't develop a problem with the spacebar after 11 days as well as all the other problems I have had. If I were to calculate the amount of time I have spent on the phone with Dell and waiting around for collections/deliveries I doubt I would be far off that £700 in time waste to be honest.
I'd argue that is a bad comparison. You're basically judging them both on a vacuum (since one is x amount more expensive but gives me reliability, that X extra is justified). but putting those two devices in context, if we take a look at earlier models, we see that macs have increased enormously in price without providing an equivalent amount of improvements.
For me it's more of a case of a company abusing it's status as leader, while others are unable to provide a real alternative.
The 2012-2015 generation 15" were bifurcated in 2013 between integrated and discrete graphics. You need to look at discrete graphics models.
The 2009-2012 generation 15" was the midrange model, and the 17" was the top of the line model, so you need to compare to that model.
The 2018's have introduced new tiers of parts on the super high end (i9 and 4tb ssd) that bump the fully spec'd model up in price. Of course that's getting a lot of attention, but those don't represent the typical builds.
See this chart on historic USD pricing [0] and historic pricing by country [1], and historic 10Y exchange rates (pick any currency) [2]. I did this comparison for someone on reddit [3] with CAD and each of their examples of price increases were 100% accounted for by looking at exchange rates.
[0] https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/mac-prices-us-usa-uni...
[1] https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/index-global-internat...
[2] https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CAD&view=10Y
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8yqu2p/the_prices_of...
The MBP may be expensive but I have never had any issues with my previous MBPs so I feel much more confident buying one. I have a busy week this week with a lot of travel and I have to now make do with this XPS with a half working spacebar as Dell's "ProSupport" can't get me an engineer until Wednesday while I am on an flight! I am just so frustrated right now.
MBP's have their own sets of issues, and aren't flawless either.
I’ve walked into plenty of places and complained about many high pitched whine noises over the years, and more often than not, I get a puzzled look followed by some variation of “what noise?”
And to preempt the obvious possibility I was merely hearing things or have tinnitus. Yes I’ve had my hearing checked, and I’ve also, on a couple of particularly egregious occasions, used sound measuring equipment that in one case validated that there was in fact a loud intermittent, nearly inaudible noise fluctuating between 80 and 85 decibels whenever it was occurring, that apparently no one else in the office noticed.
Maybe the 13" XPSs (dev editions) are better - I dont know.
I do think that if you are going Dell @ 15" it may be worth checking out the Precision line. Since this is the business version of the XPS it may have better build quality.
Apple does build high quality products so the brand identity is earned to some extent. Of course, they could sell these high quality products significantly cheaper, but why mess with a successful formula?
What ways matter to you?
macOS has all this, but it had all this for a while. There are so many good things in it. Preview.app is great -- it even lets you do simple PDF editing, while being fast, reliable, and easy to use. CoreGraphics does beautiful drawing, reasonably fast, leading e.g. to gnuplot having pretty antiailased graphs on macOS but not elsewhere (via Aquaterm -- this might be outdated information though, haven't used it in a while). The find pasteboard is clever and convenient, as are document icons -- and dragging them into Terminal even inserts the path to the document. There are so many well-thought-out details on macOS.
I don't care about iCloud integration, sync with iOS, Springboard, tabs in Finder or Maps, Siri, iMessage integration (I don't use an iPhone). The new Photos app doesn't honor mac system conventions. The Mac App Store is repulsive to me in its philosophy, and its implementation has been inept. I miss the HIG. Airpods are cool, but connecting them with my MBP works only haphazardly as you'd expect of regular old Bluetooth headphones, not as you'd expect of Apple hardware talking to Apple hardware.
I could go on for much longer, but I'll stop now :-)
But with regards to your other issues:
> The new Photos app doesn't honor mac system conventions.
This is being fixed. Photos eschewed Cocoa when it was first written and then realized this broke everything, so they're slowly adding these things back.
> The Mac App Store is repulsive to me in its philosophy, and its implementation has been inept.
I can't do anything about the philosophy, but there's a new App Store in macOS Mojave that's native as opposed to being webview-based.
> Airpods are cool, but connecting them with my MBP works only haphazardly as you'd expect of regular old Bluetooth headphones, not as you'd expect of Apple hardware talking to Apple hardware.
They're supposed to "just work", based on anecdota gathered from friends. Not sure why they don't for you.
I feel like UI is one of the things that shouldn't really be complained so much about. If you're talking about apps, then it's sort of hard to have a consistent UI when everybody's doing Electron apps or using other frameworks like it.
Jobs would never have let that keyboard out of the door. I doubt Cook has ever used one - but hey look at the animated poop emoji!
Let’s go back in time to when the choices were the $1799 12” PowerBook, $2199 15” PowerBook, or the $1299 iBook
It was a very relaxed experience for me, and I certainly hope that it's still the same with Apple. $1000 isn't chump change, but it's accessible for someone just a little above the poverty line like me.
And I agree with your parent poster. In 2009 I bought a MacBook aluminium for ~1050 Euro. Later I replaced the memory by 8GB and the hard disk by an SSD. You could open it with a simple lever to replace the hard disk, memory, and battery.
My 2016 MacBook Pro, which cost 1700 Euro in early 2017 was more expensive than my 2009 MacBook Pro after upgrades (of course, with a more modern CPU).
It's sad that we seem to be standing still on the memory/storage size front, paying even slightly higher prices. In the meanwhile extensibility has gone out of the window. The only winners are Apple and the subset of the market that want even thinner laptops.
However Apple being Apple they'd cancel warranties and shower Cease & Desists to anyone who dared to reimagine the MBP rather than allowing a licensed derivative. Too bad.
Given this was 2013 and I remember Apple increasing the price twice. One time because of exchange rates and one time when they redsigned the line a bit..
Note: I am converting my local currency to dollars (1:10) so the exact dollar value is slighty lower but you all get the idea.
Macs are expensive relative to some other products, but they are pretty cheap for what you get.
I'm not trying to be insulting. But if you're using the computer for work and you can save eight or ten or twelve hours over the course of a month, when you multiply that by your hourly rate and then again by the number of months in a year, it makes sense.
I still have two client-supplied Windows boxes on my desk I have to use daily because the client's unusual legacy needs. But it's good because it reminds me of what the Windows ecosystem is like and every time one of them does something stupid, I love my Macs more.
The Mac isn't always the best tool for the job, but since I switched from Wintel boxes to Macs in 1999, I know that each Mac purchase premium will pay for itself in time and aggravation saved.
After getting used to the cross-platform OpenShot video editor I miss my MacBook Pro even less.
Yes it’s strange. I would always buy upper-end kit for personal use for most of my adult life, had a succession of MBPs but now - even tho’ I earn more than I did in those days - I balk at the cost and have put off upgrading for a long time.
Disclaimer: I did recently upgrade and not to a Mac, for once.
If you want to look successful, you need to spend the money.
a bit like cellphones with glued batteries, they removed 'user replaceable' for thinness.
10 years or so ago, a three-year old cell phone battery would still be good for maybe three or four hours per charge. Today, I’m using a 5-year old iPhone that still gets through a typical day on a single charge.
There are also battery cases, or external battery banks, whose introduction has solved most people’s battery-related questions, except “why are people still complaining about non-removable batteries?”
all your points are valid though, but still I like a bit of swappability.
Also better water resistance.
Expensive now? A Quadra 950 in 1992 had a starting price of $7200 (1992 dollars) and that didn't include any hard drive. That's almost $13000 or more than €11000 today for the basically empty base model before several thousand more to upgrade RAM and add storage.
Also Apple seems to be the first laptop producer to raise prices instead of lowering them. In 2010, I could get a MacBook for 1000 euros. The equivalent laptop upgraded to today's standards would cost 2-3 times that.
Well, first spec them comparatively though. Which includes things like same CPUs and GPUs, and the quality of the screen, the touchpad, and the casing.
High-end MS Surface laptops, for example, cost just as much (15 inch Intel Core i7-8650U CPU clocked at 1.9 GHz, a discrete Nvidia 1060 GPU with 6GB of RAM, 16GB of memory and a terabyte SSD = $3,299, 13-inch machine with an i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and an integrated Intel GPU = $1,499 ).
>In 2010, I could get a MacBook for 1000 euros. The equivalent laptop upgraded to today's standards would cost 2-3 times that.
No, it wouldn't. The MacBook was a low spec machine for students and such. The equivalent machine today would be a lowest spec 13' Macbook Pro retina, which goes for €1.499 in Germany. So 1.5 times that (though it's not exactly comparable).
The MacBook Aluminium was everything but a low spec machine (in fact, they sold it a year later as 'MacBook Pro') and I bought it for 1050 Euro new in 2009.
The plastic MacBooks were ok, but definitely not so cramped at the time as a MacBook Pro base model today. I know it's a hard disk, but the 2008 model had more storage than today's base model MacBook Pro (160GB vs 128GB).
At the time, macOS worked well on spinning platters, while having an SSD is pretty much a necessity now.
Is it? Or just what we're used to? If you go to SSD speeds, you can't easily go back.
I don't think OS X / macOS needs an SSD any more than it used to (if you boot as HFS+ volume). It will be faster with the SSD (of course) but it wont be slower with an HD than it would be back in time, just because it's HD.