[peoplefromibiza]

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.

The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is.

I could understand 20% more, but not two times.

Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs.

That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market.

They simply will never be mainstream.

My answer was to

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

[dagw]

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.

[semi-extrinsic]

What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and you can get it for around $1800.

[dagw]

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.

[Filligree]

At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery.

It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.

[O_H_E]

> 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.

Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime.

Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime)

even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.

[wlesieutre]

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.

[swiftcoder]

> What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15?

A beautiful high-resolution display and half a day's battery life, primarily. Also the ROG Strix trackpads are truly awful, but YMMV on that front

[r00fus]

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.

[peoplefromibiza]

> But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

[dagw]

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.

[simonh]

>> 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.

[lillecarl]

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.

[hpen]

Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the fact they are everywhere.

[peoplefromibiza]

> Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people

Depends on where.

In Italy it's absolutely not true.

I am a consultant for an Italian University in Milan.

I see a lot of Chromebooks, people don't have 1.500 euros to waste on a laptop + rent + food.

Many students ask me what they can buy with their budget, that, on average, is far below a thousand euros.

[5e92cb50239222b]

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".

[handrous]

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).

[Jcowell]

Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly ?

[nicoburns]

Err... because paying it off monthly doesn't make it any cheaper. And it still ends up being a sizeable chunk of your total purchasing power.

[Jcowell]

No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.

[5e92cb50239222b]

I have no idea how much you're making (and no desire to know), but for the sake of the argument let's say it's $6k a month. Try to extrapolate our reality to your own. Would you go around with a phone that cost $18k? Would you even buy one, monthly installments or not (and then get the next one right after it comes out, like many iPhone users here tend to do)?