Because most consumers dont search for these articles, so they blindly believe all the fake comparisons that apple makes on their webpage
A week later, most of the press has already forgotten about Apple's new stuff already, and noone cares about the actual benchmarks. Except us techies, who didn't believe Apple's claims in the first place.
To be honest I'm much more disappointed that they shipped yet another crappy webcam in the Studio display after claiming it's the best webcam ever. (The webcams in all the M1 Macs suck ass, despite what Apple and the early press reviews claim)
I have yet to see any computer ship with a half-decent camera to be fair, neither in the Windows nor in the Apple world. People want thin screens, about half as thin as your average phone. There's simply no physical space to fit good optics in there - there's a reason why external high quality webcams are so large!
That's very debatable. Even individuals on HN (which is rare atmosphere) defended Apple's claims.
The other side of this is that people have been exclusively using Apple products for so long, that they don't have the experience to compare what Apple is doing with the rest of the industry. Apple only has to outdo themselves.
This isn't an accident, it happens due to Apple's pricing/marketing strategy. If you can convince people to pay a premium for your product (when compared to competitors), people psychologically _need_ that product to be better than the cheaper alternatives, or else they feel ripped off. Best to ignore anecdotes from customers and instead rely only on hard benchmarks/data and make purchasing decisions based on what is most suited to you.
Apple products have a very distinct and precise market. It's "good enough shit" for "I'm not willing to bother" price. That has _extreme_ value in the modern market. If you're asking anything serious of their hardware then you are, either, ignorant about what else is on offer (having only used Apple hardware for the past <many> years), or have workloads that so-happen to fall into that extremely narrow niche.
> Similar-performing hardware for years
In the past year I have <been forced to> worked with Apple hardware as a daily driver. When did you last you've use one of the alternatives as a daily driver?
I mean, fuck, imagine for a second that Windows updates took 45min, because Apple updates sure as fuck do. That's a hard pill to swallow when my NixOS updates take 0 seconds.
If you list all dimensions of Apple's computing products as a radar chart and as a consumer that chart "shape" meets your needs, you will not find a competitor that meets those same needs on all of those dimensions but is also meaningfully cheaper. You can find comparable devices that are comparatively priced, and you can find cheaper devices that come with a slew of compromises, but Apple is incredibly hard to beat at their own game.
Instead of taking Apple's devices as the benchmark, and trying to find a device that's cheaper and better on all axes, you have to start with the users requirements, and see where you get from there.
For example, if your requirement is "I want a silent machine for programming with lots of RAM for running VMs" then it's very unlikely that the cheapest option is going to be a Mac.
If your requirement is "I want a machine for checking my emails and watching Netflix with a big screen" then it's also very unlikely that the cheapest option is a Mac.
The only scenario where a Mac is reasonably priced is if your requirement is "I want a machine that is exactly like one of the few machines that Apple sells and I don't mind its shortcomings".
As far as I understand it, their laptops have also been within a pretty reasonable margin of being competitively priced (at least for base models) for many years. Sure you can find cheaper alternatives, but those usually come with significant sacrifices (build quality, missing features or lower-quality versions of those features), etc. Obviously different people can vary widely in how much they value feature sets, but competitors' laptop models that line up closely in those feature sets have tended to be around the same price for awhile now.
Also, we forget that these new "techs" come every year and its boring to track each of these. Companies are using this as advantage.
More like, "inexperienced". Tech aside (contexts where complexities offer controversial space in some comparisons, out of benchmarks that may not measure the actual general goal), many are convinced that the spread of false information is severely limited through social and legal devices: loss of reputation, sanctions (e.g. "false advertisement") etc.
The review in the verge hits this point. The verge previously bought a $16,599 model from apple, which performs worse than the current $4,000 model.
https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-...
They're not that fake to begin with, at least not in "experienced performance" aka how performant the system feels for the user. Apple's stuff is expensive but in terms of performance even the Intel-based Mac lineup just blows the direct competition away:
- Apple's solid-aluminium body provides vastly better thermals than the Windows world which is usually plastic crap, which allows them to run the same Intel processor on boost mode for a longer time, and the fans are at least in my experience a lot better (especially in loudness and "annoyance" factor - even at full power, the fans of a MacBook are way better to listen to than those of your average Windows laptop). For the Mac Pro / iMac lineup, same thing. Most of the Windows world ships with barely adequate coolers and no thinking of airflow, whereas Apple... well, open any tower Mac Pro and see for yourself. That's what a cooler is called...
- Apple's OS has way less crap and clutter going on that gobbles performance (there's just at this moment a submission on the front page that details among other things how Windows got transmuted into a horrible mess of advertising and half a dozen competing frameworks), and they have a lot more control over the hardware and driver stack which means that Apple does not depend on the shoddy work that vendors for the Windows world can pass as "quality tested drivers". The result is better battery performance (because as Apple can control the entire stack they can make full use of sleep modes and other energy saving measures) and less bugs.
- related, but not by something that Apple has done: There isn't much malware going on on macOS and never has been when compared to the Windows world - you can get by without a virus scanner just fine. In contrast, most of the Windows world ships some crap "free for three months" virus scanner bundled which just destroys performance.
- Apple's own chipset designs are, while still based on standards such as the ARM ISA, completely fine-tuned to their needs - which means that, unlike the Windows world which carries about three decades worth of old garbage in their CPUs, Apple can devote more of the same chip area to the needs of modern computing.
- Here's a bit of a controversial take: Unlike the Windows world where most vendors ship systems with highly modular components (i.e. CPU, RAM and storage can be taken and upgraded), Apple solders the chips to the mainboards, very near together. That allows not just for higher performance because the latencies are lower but also because the chips can be cooled together and so run at a higher frequency.