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Comment by mtsr | Hacker News Reader

Except Apple purposefully chooses to stay within a niche (of expensive laptops). So the vast majority of laptops will still ship with intel.

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For now. Apple will transition all processors over to M-Series in the coming 2 years; probably finished earlier.

The cheapest M1 laptop is still almost £1000 with a definitely not future-proof amount of RAM and Storage.

I'm guessing M1 ain't cheap

Isn't latest generation is $100 cheaper and apple usually cheaper than windows-based.

At least in the US market (I don't have experience in other markets), Apple is definitely not the cheaper laptop company. The average laptop sold in 2019 sold for ~$700.[0] The cheapest laptop Apple currently sells is $1,000. Apple only sells high-end luxury laptops. Most laptops sold are cheaper than even the cheapest Mac.

When you compare similarly spec'd machines from other manufacturers then yeah they're usually in the same ballpark numbers. I don't know I'd say Apple is always more expensive or always cheaper when looking at only the high-end price range.

[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/dont-be-so-cheap-fiv...

They are probably binning a lot of product right now. They'll eventually need to do something with all those chips that didn't make the cut. This is apple we're talking about. There's surely a 5+ year plan to develop this ecosystem fully. I'd be more surprised if we didn't see a complete line of custom chips across all apple products within the decade.

Doesn't Apple already use their own chips for everything? AFAIK the Mac was the last product not to use Apple Silicon and it has switched.

The Mac line hasn't fully switched over to Apple Silicon yet. Notably, the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Pro, and some Macbook Pro models are still Intel.

Eh, the cheapest M1 Mac is the Mac Mini at $699, $100 less than the outgoing model and offering better perfromance at some tasks than the iMac Pro. Keep in mind that there is the whole 'profit margin' factor. At $699, the mac mini offers much better perfromance than the outgoing model while costing $100 less. Why chop even more money off it?

Apple's cost in manufacturing has always been rooted in quality components and Software Engineering. They just don't build low end models and likely never will. The fact that you can buy a $300 iPad is actually kinda weird for Apple.

Yeah, but Apple is a small player in the PC space and have no server business. In other words, maybe intel has time to catch up?

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