It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
There is a lot of money in AI chips, and Apple could definitely get a fairly large slice of that business if they put the work in (well, if they are putting the work in now, depending on what Baltra is really about).
They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box.
> They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.
NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?
man, my opinion of Lenovo has tanked in the last decade and I'm only just realizing it now. I always thought of Dell as kinda shitty, but Lenovo had a great thing going that just kinda atrophied in some cases, and actively got worse in others
It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)
The white plastic Mac laptop, depending on the generation, was either called the iBook, or later the Macbook when they moved to Intel. Blame it on IBM who didn't want Apple to use PowerBook for a Mac with an Intel chip, which forced the company to rename the whole line.
I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)
The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.
Certainly but I'd guess the problem won't manifest for years and other showstopping pieces might fail before then. That old frankenstein macbook of mine had the same 850 evo ssd I shoved in it for like 8 years of use and abuse, always high temps with that macbook too. People say you shouldn't use an ssd like that but oh well, it seems to work alright.
There is just no way it is actually barely handling them. My 2012 with the dual core handles that. Fans turning on doesn't mean it barely handles it. That is just how those intel macs were. They were like that on day 1 in 2012. Spotlight indexing could be enough to spin the fans. Still does the job though even if its hot and noisy.
Depends what your criteria for handling are. The documents work, but navigation (like scrolling) is a slideshow, there is visible lag between pressing a key and character appearing on the screen.
When you switch between browser and Word etc, there is a lag, you can see screen being redrawn etc.
Yes, it "does the job". But experience is abysmal.
Even for the arm series macs the max cpus run way hotter and spin fans sooner than base model in general tasks. Just how those chips are designed. They aren't designed to throttle to keep temps down, they are designed to give you all the horsepower knowing you don't care about noise and heat and care about performance.
Its so weird, something i noticed (or made up) is that at my workplaces, the topspec workstations are always taking ages to boot (counting the ram?). My 15 year old xeon win box boots in about 10sec. Maybe they dont have fastboot enabled idk…
My workplace installs a ton of background software on their PCs. God help you, if it's your first time logging into any PC there and it has to load everything in your account/profile for the first time.
They don't last more than a couple of years before they start becoming painfully slow, even after being reimaged.
Whereas my 10+ year old laptops and desktops are as fast as the day I bought or assembled them.
If the computer has been overworked in the past, it permanently slows it down. Heat can permanently change the electrical resistance of the metal conductors in the computer's components.
It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?
You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.
The first iPhone launched without a carrier subsidy.
When the iPhone 4 launched on Verizon in 2011, you could either spend $200 and get locked into a 2-year contract, $300 and get locked into a 1-year contract, or buy the thing outright for $650. Since you didn't get a discount for bringing your own phone to Verizon, it was more cost-effective to get the subsidized phone.