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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is.

It is Apple’s best selling computer by quite a bit. They sell metric assloads of the $999 base model each fall when school starts.

IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.

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> Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is.

> IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.

It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. The M chips are amazing, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions.

"But that would make it more expensive."

Yes it would... by pennies. It is a bit ridiculous to sell a phone as expensive as the current iphones and limit them to USB 2.

Generally speaking, people don’t use the port on an iPhone for anything other than charging. The fact that it supports USB v-anything is mostly unnecessary cost.

If you are thinking in any way whatsoever about the non-wireless data transfer speeds on your phone, you are not the market or user it was designed for. Same goes for external monitors on an MBA.

I agree that USB isn't commonly used but that's kinda the point - it doesn't hurt apple much to do it (and they're not saving anything remotely significant), but they still do it to force the few who do want to use fast USBs. A more common example where nearly everyone would notice would be the abysmal ram in their phones until very recently.

> knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions.

I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.

I meant that bit in general and not specifically for the mac, but for eg they sold iPads with 32gb storage as recently as 2020 iirc. Even now the base level macs have much less ram and storage than similarly priced windows counterparts. I think part of it is just so they can say "macbooks start at $xx!". There are more examples I can't think of right now.

the 2000 Euro M3 Macbook pro also supports only one external display and is the same size and weight as the ones that support more.

Come off it.

- the 14" M3 is $1600, but limited to a single external display, and actually only has two TB ports, it's just sad

- the M3 Pro is limited to two external displays, despite an entry price of $2000

$3199 is the baseline to be able to use 3 external displays (although at that price you can plug up to 4).

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