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Comment by asn0 | Hacker News Reader

I've started to think Apple is more competitive on laptops than it looks from the price.

Every time I've priced out a laptop with similar configuration to my MBP (including a good-quality display, NvME SSD, good battery life), it always ends up costing about the same as an MBP. And then Apple's customer service definitely tips in their favor (I've been spoiled by fast, convenient, competent repair service at the Apple store).

So either everyone is making big margins on well-configured laptops, or the perception of over-priced MBP's is misplaced.

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I was just commenting to my wife how remarkable I find it that my 2012 Macbook Pro 15 Retina is meeting all my needs as a software consultant. I used to think 3 years, maybe 4, was the useful lifespan of a high-end machine for daily professional use. In a few months it'll be 7 (seven) years old. It has 3 or 4 dead pixels, but everything else about it is working flawlessly. Maybe they don't make em like they used to, but man have I gotten my money's worth out of this one.

I'm posting this from a Macbook Pro I bought in November 2008. My family uses it daily.

My daily work computer is a 2012 Macbook Air which I dropped from a standing height 4 years ago. It has one bent corner but still runs great.

I still have iMacs from 2007 that are being used by my kids. I only upgraded the HDD to SSD a couple of years ago and they work flawlessly. No viruses, no tech support needed for 10 years.

That is just amazing hardware, but on the other hand, I have a pair of AirPods that just can't autoconnect to my MacBook unless I fiddle with the Bluetooth and speaker icons in the toolbar every time. And AirPods were fucking expensive and both are produced by Apple. What gives? How can they be so incompetent in making a wireless device connect to another wireless device?

I think the problem with the AirPods is Bluetooth. I refuse to use any Bluetooth device because I've never had a pleasant experience with it.

Yeah Bluetooth sucks, and this is compounded by Apple's subpar BT handling in macOS.

That said, my Sennheiser HD1 headphones are absolutely amazing, and I don't miss being physically tethered to my laptop.

Yep, I'm still using a 2008 MacBook Pro daily - I only replaced the HDD with an SSD and it runs great.

i am still using my t420 think pad from 2008

runs perfect

just saying...

That's mostly a function of the general slowdown in the hardware cycle (for most applications).

I have both a Mac and a PC laptop of that vintage and they're both still perfectly suitable for anything short of current gaming or other extreme tasks.

I have owned four MacBook Pros since the introduction of the 2012 retina.

The years being 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2017.

The only two working still are the 2012 and the 2017 but I had a warranty swap on the 2017 in early 2018.

That 2012 model is incredible.

I'm still using my mid-2012 Asus laptop that was like €1300 at the time.

I did buy a few upgrades since then (16GB RAM, bigger SSD, new battery) but given that I don't do any gaming, there is very little that a new purschase would get me.

So this is definitely not a Mac-specific thing.

Just to add another datum: Thinkpad T420, 2011. Bought used two years ago and still the best laptop I've ever owned.

Tim Cook was in charge of this sort of logistics when Steve was alive. There are worse people to be left in charge.

When I bought a Cinema Display I figured out that a display with the same response time and color gamut would run about $75 cheaper and have a plastic case.

$75 for aluminum, more ports and being able to pick it up that day was more than fair.

This has been true for me until the last generation (Touchbar) Macbooks came out in 2016. They seem to be vastly more expensive than the older generation was and are usually quite a bit more than a comparable non-Apple Laptop. A well equipped 15" used to be around 2500 EUR, nowadays it's 600+ EUR more.

Yeah the touchbar really drives up the price, it's basically an apple watch built into a macbook (big oled screen, fingerprint reader and the apple watch's chip, plus all the interconnects required). So adding the price of an apple watch to a macbook pro makes sense.

sadly it's mostly useless

This depends a lot where you live. Possibly in the US this is true but currently here in Australia to get an MBP that matches the top spec Dell XPS15 would cost at least $1k aud more. And still not have the touchscreen the dell has.

That didn't always used to be the case. Previously at launch an MBP was often quite keenly priced for the specs. But the last couple of generations have been badly overpriced.

Same for Germany, I actually have to go out of my way to add bonus stuff to reach the price point of an MBP (I use ThinkPads).

No problem for me - I only buy used MacBooks lately. They work just as well and are cheap and you can always find one. As a side benefit, I prefer to prop up the second hand market today than the producer. I only have a new MacBook at work and I hate its keyboard and lack of varied ports (I always need to use a fugly dongle with it). Unfortunately the company can't buy second hand :-(

> the last couple of generations have been badly overpriced.

Which ties back into the earlier comment on this thread that after Jobs died, the company has gradually devolved into a 'premium cost for not quite as premium hardware' tech company. Previously MacBooks were well priced for what you got (Australian here also), nowadays they are more expensive that equivalent laptops which have more connectivity, touch screen etc.

> Every time I've priced out a laptop with similar configuration to my MBP

Which one is that? Until this past July, they were consistently a CPU generation behind every other brand on the market.

I paid $800 (I think it was $899 retail) for my current 13" Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It has an i7/DDR4 RAM vs the i5/DDR3 in the MBP, but given the slower hard drive, let's call it even.

The comparable MBP is $600 more at $1,499.00. The display is no doubt better, but I don't know that it justifies that much more money.

This has been true for at least as long as I've been buying apple laptops (over a decade).

If you want something with a similar form factor (light and thin) then anything with similar hardware specs from another company has always been around the same price, or more expensive.

I think the perception of over priced laptops is misplaced because people look at base specs, but ignore form factor. And, yes you could argue that you don't need something so thin and light, and maybe that's true for some people, but if it's a feature you want then apple laptops are competitively priced.

I like Apple too - writing this on a 2013 rMBP. Works flawlessly (touch wood).

But the new Pro series is just not pro enough for me. Why the hell should I buy a dongle for everything? It's supposed to be pro - you shouldn't have to basically carry a whole bunch of dongles to get stuff done. I don't know, maybe I am technophobe, but sometimes taking away the stuff which works and useful to shave a mm in height is just stupid from my perspective. If I want a super light laptop without the need for ports etc. I would go for an Air.

Dunno what's going to happen but will stick to my 2013 till it literally won't work anymore.

/end of rant

Apple's long been a proponent of doing things wirelessly; the main problem is that both power and displays aren't yet wireless. I wouldn't mind if Apple came out with a new display or 'docking station', I think they would need only one cable to connect the screen + provide power. USB-C is really versatile like that.

A shame they got rid of the SD card slot though, and I will be very upset if they get rid of the 3.5mm as well.

If one of the three or four configurations Apple sells is exactly the one you want, there isn't much or any premium. But if you make a fair comparison by picking a configuration at random (or e.g. pick a particular program that you want to run) then you can easily end up paying 50-100% more to get an Apple that does what you need.

Out of curiosity, I specc'd out a Thinkpad T480 as close as I could to the base model MBP, and they are reasonably similar in price (the Thinkpad is $2100 to the MBP's $2400).

Thing is, if you drop a few upgrades, such as dropping the CPU speed by a few percent, dropping the dGPU, going to a 1080P screen, and using a SATA instead of NVME drive, you're down to $1400 for largely minor decreases in performance and capability (none of those things would affect my use cases appreciably, you might be different). Apple doesn't give you those options in a MBP, and the standard MacBook is pretty outdated, topping out at an old dual core i7.

I’m sorry but dropping to a 1080p after using a Retina display or even a 2K dell screen is absolutely horrible. If you’re a programmer you spend your day looking at screens - make it nice.

Also, the difference between a SATA SSD and NVMe is night and day.

...that's largely irrelevant to what was said.

A similar model to the base MBP is ~$300 (~12%) cheaper, but by also dropping some other features they didn't feel were important for their use case, they could get the price close to $1400 (40% cheaper), but Apple doesn't even offer those options.

The point is not to say that a $1400 laptop is equivalent to the base MBP, but that a $2100 laptop is, and a cheaper MBP might be possible if apple was willing to offer some lower end/dated features. But they aren't.

How heavy are both of those laptops, though?

FWIW I specced out a T480s and I got something that in terms of RAM wasn't even available on macs at the time (24 GB), weights under 1.5kg, has HDMI, ethernet USB and USB-C, a matte HIDPI display and a proper keyboard (and it came out costing like a top of the line MBP).

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