Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

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Agree completely.

I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either.

The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them.

There’s a valid argument to be made that they’re also marked up to higher margins than rivals even beyond the above, but I’m not sure if any end user has really ever eaten that cost - If you buy a MacBook, there has always been someone (students) to buy it back again 3/5/10 years down the road for a significant chunk of it’s original outlay. That doesn’t happen with any other laptop - they’re essentially scrap (or worth next to nothing) within 5 years. After 10 years I might actually expect the value to be static or even increase for its collector value (e.g. clamshell iBook G3s)

The total cost of ownership for Apple products is actually lower over three years than any rival products I’m aware of.

> The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them.

It's not just intangibles. I really like using Macs, but my latest computer is a Dell XPS 17. This is not a cheap computer if you get the 4k screen, 64GB of RAM and the good graphics card. At those prices, you should consider the MBP16. The MBP is better built, has a better finish and just feels nicer.

Thing is, Dell will sell me an XPS 17 with a shitty screen because I don't care about the difference and would rather optimise battery life. I can get 3rd party RAM and SSDs. I can get a lesser graphics card because I don't need that either. I can get a more recent Intel CPU. And I can get the lesser model with a greater than 25% discount (they wouldn't sell me the better models with a discount though).

I think some of the Apple Tax, is them not willing you sell you a machine closer to your needs, not allowing some user replaceable parts and not having discounts.

Yes and no. To be honest I did the same back-of-the-napkin math that you did prior to buying my MBP - the thing is the TCO is even worse if you customise the machine.

Example - a Mac is a Mac for resale purposes - if I attempt to later sell an XPS that I've opened up and put an SSD in and a couple of SODIMMS - I now need to recoup my cost on all of those things. The problem is that if someone is looking at a used XPS with upgraded SSD and upgraded RAM they're statistically unlikely to fully investigate and value the (probably really good) parts that you upgraded it with - they're just going to see X,Y,Z numbers and price accordingly.

Generally though, a 5 year old Windows laptop with 16GB RAM still commands the value of a 5 year old Windows laptop as best I could tell looking at resale values.

I wasn’t trying to address the resale value. Only the tax part. The perception of the tax comes from Apple simply not offering compromised parts for a particular set of parameters. And other manufacturers willing to sell at large discounts regularly!

Can’t argue with this. They gouge absurdly on storage and memory.

It works both ways: if you get something in Apple hardware, you will get the nice version of it. If can't get something there, you will have to be without.

Example: I've been looking at X1 Nano. It is improvement compared to other lines (it has 16:10 display finally!), but it is still somewhere in the middle of the road.

The competitor from Apple has slightly better display, much better wifi and no option for LTE/5G.

Nano has 2160x1350 450 nits display with Dolby Vision. Apple has 2560x1600 400 (Air)/500 (MBP) nits display with P3. The slightly higher resolution means that Apple would display 9 logical bits using 8 physical when using the 1440x900@2X resolution (177% scale), but to get similar scale on Nano that would mean displaying 8 logical pixels using 6 physical (150% scale). Similarly, the Dolby Vision is an uknown (how it could get used?), the P3 from Apple is a known.

X1 Nano has 2x2 MIMO wifi - Intel AX 200 - with no option for anything better. There are only two antennas in the display frame, you cannot add more (ok, 3, but the third one is for cellular, and cannot be used for wifi if you forego cellular). Apple ships with 4x4 MIMO. If you have decent AP at office or home, it is a huge difference, yet no PC vendors are willing to improve here.

The cellular situation is the exact opposite. You can get cellular module for Thinkpads, and you cannot for Apple, at all, so if you go this route, you have to live with workarounds.

> I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either.

I think it's still accurate and honestly that's apple's business model.

I think the resale value for a student macbook doesn't really matter. It still costs the student - while they are poor - as much as 4x what other students pay for their laptop. Many students are paying $250 for their laptop.

I threw out a laptop I had from 2008 that was at the time top-of-the-line 3000$. I bought it in the US when I was there on vacation. This was when the dollar was at such a low that I got the device for at the time the equivalent of something like 1200€.

I couldn't sell that device for half of that a year and a half later. I got a newer laptop in 2016, again very specced out for a laptop. About 1800€, couldn't sell it for 800€ 2 years later. I still use that last one because I didn't want to sell it so far under what the market value should be.

If you try to sell anything Apple related that isn't more than 5 years old you won't have that problem at all. You can get a good value for the device and sell it without too much of a hassle.

Even if you're a student you would likely be better off buying the cheapest macbook you can find (refurbished or second hand if needed). If you don't like the OS you can just install Windows or a Linux distro on it.

Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

> Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

For note taking, word processing, basic image editing, web browsing, video playing, etc, you can easily get a capable enough laptop for that price.

This is not comparing like-for-like in terms of what the machines can do, of course. Apple's range doesn't even remotely try to cover that part of the market so a direct comparison is unfair if you are considering absolute price/capability of the devices irrespective of the user's requirements, but for work that doesn't involve significant computation that bargain-basement unit may adequately do everything many people need it to do (assuming they don't plan to also use it for modern gaming in non-working hours).

> If you try to sell anything Apple related that isn't more than 5 years old you won't have that problem at all.

Most people don't consider the resale value of a machine when they buy it. For that to be a fair comparison you have to factor in the chance of it being in good condition after a couple of year's use (this will vary a lot from person to person) and the cost of any upgrades & repairs needed in that time (again more expensive for Apple products by my understanding).

And if you buy a $500 laptop and hand it down or bin it, then you are still better off (assuming you don't need a powerful machine) than if you dropped $3,000 for an iDevice and later sold it for $2,000.

> what the market value should* be.*

"Market value" is decided by what the market will bare, not what we want to be able to sell things for, and new & second hand are often very different markets.

I think it is realistic. It's easy to think people have money to spend on $999 laptop when you are living in a first world country. 90% of the world probably couldn't afford that.

> Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

I got an i7 T430s for 200€ a few years ago and it's still plenty fast for coding, so I don't see why this number wouldn't be realistic.

> Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

I think it's fairly realistic. The Dell Latitude 7250 is probably a good representative of what you can get used for ~$220-$300 US these days: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m... The dual-core processor should still be serviceable for everyday work, at ~1.3kg it's light enough to carry around all day, a 1080p resolution should be OK on a 12" screen, and it can take up to 16GiB of RAM, though holding out for one with 16GiB preinstalled will definitely tend to push the cost up to nearer $300: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

(Then any laptop with similar specs except with a 2-in-1 form factor tends to cost a fair bit more, but that's not a must-have for most students or anyone who might have been considering a MacBook.)

> Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

I'm not a student but it's pretty close I think.

I invested $350 into a Chromebook that runs native Linux[0] about 4 years ago and it's still going strong as a secondary machine I use when I'm away from my main workstation.

It has a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, an SSD, a good keyboard and weighs 2.9 pounds. It's nothing to write home about but it's quite speedy to do every day tasks and it's even ok for programming where I'm running decently sized Flask, Rails and Phoenix apps on it through Docker.

If I had to use it as my primary development machine for web dev I wouldn't be too disappointed. It only starts falling apart if you need to do anything memory intensive like run some containers while also running VMs, but you could always spend a little more and get 8gb of memory to fix that problem.

I'm sure nowadays (almost 5 years later) you could get better specs for the same price.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...

Right, except that when you stop using the Chromebook every day or move on to something better, will it have residual value or just go to landfill?

I love Chromebooks, don't get me wrong, but the problem I've come to realise over time is that many are specced and priced just about at a point where they'll quickly move into obsolescence not long after purchase - at which point the only thing keeping them out of the ground is your willingness to tolerate them after the updates have stopped.

The Mac will still be worth a good chunk of money to someone.

I have a Chromebook Flip here that I adored for several years that I couldn't give away now.

To answer your question accurately will depend on how long it ends up lasting for.

For example if it works well enough for another 4 years, now we need to ask the question on whether or not you could get reasonable value out of an 8+ year old Mac. I never sold one so I'm not sure. My gut tells me it's going to be worth way less than what you bought it for even if it's in good condition.

But more generally, yeah I have no intentions on re-selling this thing if I decide I'm done with it before it physically breaks. I'd probably donate it or give it away for free (if someone wanted it).

I don't see that as too bad tho. If I can get 7-8 years out of $350 device I'm pretty happy, especially if the next one costs about the same.

It's a tough comparison tho because a decently decked out MBP is going to be like 8x as expensive but also have way better specs.

"I think the resale value for a student macbook doesn't really matter"

It's literally the only thing that matters if you're the seller.

If you have your choice of two items to sell 5 years from now, you ideally want to be selling the item that's worth substantially more to the buyer, rather than trying to sell something worthless.

Assuming there's nothing dishonest happening, it's really up to the market to price.

Thing is, the student buying the MacBook is probably going to be substantially better off that way too, in that it will likely retain proportionally more of it's value from that point too.

> I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either.

Apple on the new Mac Pro that I got a month ago: 192GB memory? That will be $3,000. NewEgg? We'll sell you the same specced memory from the same manufacturer for $800. And you get to keep/sell the baseline 32GB memory.

8TB SSD? $2,000, thanks. OWC and NewEgg? Here, have a PCIe 4xM.2 card and 4 2TB SSDs for $1,100. Oh, and they'll be 50% faster, you just can't have them as the only drive on the system (my Apple SSD runs at around 2800MB/s, the alternative, 4500MB/s).

So they are entirely marked up, and look in any forum - by far most people are not doing what I'm doing, and just "going straight Apple for convenience", though the memory installation was less than 1 minute, and the SSD installation less than 5, including unboxing, seating the 4 drives, reinstalling the heatsink on the card and installing. I get "my time is money", and "it just works" (which, as we know, more and more is less the case with Apple), but really, for me, that was a $3,100 savings for <10 minutes effort.

In terms of high performance products, I’m actually really excited for the next Mac Pro. They’ve got novel design options open to them that no rival has.

The M1 costs Apple relatively little to produce per unit - I would expect them to keep the overall design for a Mac Pro but have stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has. Obviously performance would depend upon the application being amenable to a design like that but a 32 or 64 5nm core Mac Pro is not out of the question, and would be impossible to match for performance in the next few years by any Hackintosh.

Even after capacity frees up at TSMC for AMD to move to 5nm, they won’t be able to co-locate memory like the M1 does due to standards compliance with DRAM sticks.

I think the next couple of years will be really turbulent for other vendors - the M1 is likely far more significant for the PC market due to how disruptive it is than it is for the Mac market.

AMD would be able to do DRAM on package for the lowest wattage "ultrabook" chips, at the cost of producing a very different package for them vs. the bigger laptops that are expected to have upgradable SODIMMs. But I doubt that this "co-location" is that huge for performance. Whatever memory frequency and timings Apple is using are likely easily achievable through the regular mainboard PCB, maybe at the cost of slightly more voltage. DDR4 on desktop is overclockable to crazy levels and that's going through lots of things (CPU package - socket pins - board - slots - DIMMs).

> stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has

Quad or more package NUMA topology?? The latency would absolutely suck.

Yeah, I'm no kernel developer, but I've been replying to anyone saying 'just stick n * M1 in it' that even AMD has been trying to move back to more predictable memory access latency, less NUMA woes.

But in general we're moving toward even less uniform memory, with some of it living on a GPU. NUMA pretended that all memory was the same latency, because C continues to pretend we're on a faster PDP-11, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction as for how high-performance computation is progressing.

Why would latency suck? 64-cores are already only beneficial for algorithms which are parallelizable -- with the most common class of parallelizable algorithm being data parallelizable ... So -- shouldnt the hardware and os be able to present the programmer illusion of uniform memory and just automatically arrange for the processing to happen on the compute resources closest to the RAM / move the memory closer to the appropriate compute resource as required?

It might force Intel / AMD / Broadcom to get serious about hardware and at least integrate more of the components for notebooks. Maybe not go full on OEM, but a lot more than the CPU, because M1 is probably fundamentally winning with SoC design.

I would like to know if they are using fundamentally better batteries, and how much a 5nm process lead is behind this.

But I will hand it to Apple, if they finally did something to break the 4-8 hour battery life limit, a limit that always seemed to stay the same despite node shrink after node shrink after node shrink, and really about the same on-screen performance for usual browsing/productivity application use.

I was pretty distrustful of the ARM move, but if they deliver this for the Macbook Pro, I'll hop to ARM.

Associated with the CPU people "getting serious" is them pushing an OS, which would have to be Linux. Intel should have done this 20 years ago, at least as leverage to make Windows improve itself.

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