The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.
But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.
I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market.
Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again.
Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it.
edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
4 GB dedicated VRAM instead of 16 GB shared memory is better/worse depending on workload.
Heat, battery life, fan noise, etc have been discussed to death so I'll gloss over those. Past that, the other huge thing is the screen:
62.5% sRGB coverage is a really garbage color gamut. Supposedly the "G513IM-HQ088R" gets you a DCI-P3 screen but I literally can't find that model available for purchase anywhere to check what it costs.
1920x1080 vs 3024x1964 is about 1/3 the pixel count of the 14" Mac. Or compared to the 16" 3456x2234 it's about 1/4 the pixel count.
You have to install Windows or none of the benchmarks are meaningful. That's a showstopper for me. Forums say installing linux on there is an undertaking and you end up with critical drivers still not working (Mic, etc).
Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.
>> I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead
>I would!
>CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them.
Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally.
Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it.
Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".
Not "nothing else". They're the only half-decent vendor if you don't want to have to think about your computer very much, and also want it to mostly work well and do useful things automatically or very easily (especially when used in concert with other Apple stuff). They're in a niche in which they have, essentially, no competition. I wish they did, and I'm sure plenty of other Apple "fans" do too. I'd rather be on an open source OS, for one thing, all else being equal (which it very much is not, which is the problem).
The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast.
>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you.
So, really, what this is saying is that a brand new, constructor specific 5nm SoC that is tailor made with a CPU/memory quasi-direct link is about equal to a year and a half old 7nm CPU, while being twice as expensive. As much as the Apple fanboys can scream about pOwEr EfFiCciEnCy!1, making up a $1500 difference just in electricity costs is going to be hard. Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
> Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
Counterpoint: battery life and, for the first time in my life, being able to treat my laptop as actually portable and not have to carry a power brick and mouse (because other touchpads were so terrible) everywhere is the main thing that sold me on Macs, initially, after ~15 years of my computing life being totally Mac-free.
It sold me fast. Turned me from "pft, Macs, OK, whatever, they're nothing special" to "huh, maybe there's something to this" to "I'm never buying anything but a Mac again until competitors can match [list of features I now wouldn't want to give up]" in like a month.
Sadly, no other vendors seem close to closing that gap. Macs remain a category of their own. Not a great situation.
My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds.
It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.