[jb1991]

I’ve owned both windows and Apple computers, quite many of them, over the last 20 years. On average, the Apple machines last at least twice as long as the windows machines while still being fully usable. One could argue just based on that basic math that they are worth twice the price.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Compared to what? Junk? My w541 is 10 years old and I just ordered parts from Lenovo to perform cosmetic repairs on it.

[12345hn6789]

If you take care of your devices they will last. - typed out on a gen 1 i7 desktop

[jabbany]

Unfortunately, Apple machines are usually 4 - 10 times more expensive, making this choice still quite difficult.

[jb1991]

They are expensive but 10X certainly seems like a stretch. Show me comparably specd hardware only 10% the price of an Apple machine?

[jabbany]

See, here's where the undefined nature of things comes in. "Comparably spec'd" needs to be conditioned on what task you're aiming for.

A "pure gold hammer" is a terrible idea and would also be terribly expensive. But asking for a "comparably spec'd" hammer presumes the absurd premise that the material of the hammer must be kept consistent regardless of its intended use just for the purpose of being comparable.

To preface, I totally understand the value proposition of Apple devices for some use cases, but it is important to recognize that they are aiming for certain workloads.

As examples:

I have one friend that runs virtualization workloads that require a lot of memory, a lot of storage, a lot of cores, but they don't really care about memory bandwidth, "having a display", or even the noise of the device. An older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k, whereas a "comparable" Mac Pro costs upwards of $10k! (Of course nobody would use a Mac Pro for this workload, so the comparison is moot)

I also have friends that are digital artists. They care about having a high brightness and color accuracy display but otherwise don't do anything that taxes the computer. They also appreciate having high quality speakers and long battery life. Some of them run M1 Macbook Airs at the lowest 8G memory configuration for ~$800 (discounted new from other retailers) + a digitizer for ~$100, while the closest comparable non-Apple laptops are all premium devices upwards of $1.5k and even then they are still worse in the battery department!

As for myself, I do light dev work, virtualization, gaming, but also travel a lot and present at conferences. I use a GPD Win Max 2 for a little over $1k (early Indiegogo pricing). The closest Apple offering would be a 14" MBP, and configured as needed (32GB/2T) would be about $3800 and still be short a 4G modem and a couple of extra devices like a digitizer, game controller, and dongle for USB-A. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Can't win 'em all.

[wtallis]

> An older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k,

Are you referring to a used server, or just buying a minimally-equipped new server and upgrading it with aftermarket RAM and (low-quality) SSDs?

[jabbany]

Used (decommissioned from equipment retirement from companies) server, upgraded by maxing out the RAM slots and using the cheapest available SSDs.

This is a pretty common practice for homelab enthusiasts, or so I hear.

[Thews]

A micro ryzen 5600U build with really bad quality components can be half the price of a mac mini with equal CPU performance. If you upgrade all of the mac specs you can probably get a larger divide, but IMO maxed out macs don't make much sense for most people.

[wtallis]

It's that focusing on one specific aspect of the system and compromising on everything else that produces the really big discrepancies. I tried to use PCPartPicker to spec out a rough equivalent of a maxed-out Mac Pro in terms of CPU cores, GPU performance, and RAM and SSD capacity, but still ended up at with at most a 3.5x disparity, and that's ignoring the GPU VRAM capacity limitation and features like Thunderbolt and 10GbE and assembly and warranty and support. If you want to assign $0 value to a large portion of a Mac's features then you can make it look wildly overpriced, but that's mostly an admission that it's the wrong product for your needs.

[Thews]

The years of the keyboard issues left a bad taste in my mouth, but I switched to a non mac laptop for my previous laptop and now I'm back again. The coupling of the OS and hardware really do make for a great user experience. I don't want to play games on my laptop, which is the only real use case where I hear valid complaints. I just need my dev environment and snappy research and communication.

A valid complaint from me is linux based container resource utilization. The only really good fix for that IMO is if apple did something like WSL2 or FreeBSD's linux ABI and had an efficient compatibility layer. For now I just run dev containers on my (linux) desktop.

[jb1991]

A 2X price difference is certainly believable, but I was responding to the suggestion of a 10X price difference.

[mattkevan]

You mean it’s possible to buy the exact equivalent of a M1 MacBook Air for £99-£249?

Send me the link, that sounds amazing.

[Apfel]

Yeah, the M1 MBA was really so out of the norm in terms of value that it's pretty much impossible to find anything like it at the price point. It literally turned me into an Apple person, essentially overnight. I no longer even switch on my windows machines.

[jabbany]

Not sure where you got the impression of that?

There do not exist "equivalent"s to any Apple devices (I don't see them licensing the M1/2 chips to anyone else anytime soon). But depending on what you care about, a "comparable" Apple device could be 10x more expensive. Of course, for other tasks a "comparable" Apple device can also be _cheaper_ than any non-Apple device available!

Only looking at aiming for similar "longevity" (since the parent is using that as a benchmark), there are plenty of devices that have a useful life comparable to Apple devices at 1/4 - 1/10 the price.

[tverbeure]

I'd love to see your 10x example.

[jabbany]

There is one above in the server/homelab space. Items like memory and storage are charged huge markups* so if you need a lot of capacity of those you are going to quickly get into the 10x range!

As for longevity, if you consider software support ending as EoL, software/OS support for a huge swath of Intel iMacs (especially those with DGPUs) was dropped by Apple quite a few OS releases ago and you have to run community patches to keep them working. Whereas similar decade old hardware still run Win 10 and Linux out of the box.

*: Don't get me wrong though, the markups are for good reason. x86 platforms don't offer anything close to Apple's ARM chip memory bandwidth (which are closer to DGPU levels). Similarly, for flash/SSDs.

[themadturk]

My M1 MacBook Air (8GB RAM) was cheaper than the 16GB Dell Latitude 13 i7 I bought a year and a half previously. I am much happier with my MBA, even at 8GB, than I ever was with my Dell.