[ramesh31]

>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."

Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.

[Abishek_Muthian]

That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.

[nok22kon]

RAM upgrade possibility has a downside though - very low RAM bandwidth, which is highly relevant today if you want to run local LLMs

[oblio]

Hmmm, not always. Between at least 1998 and 2005, PCs were just better. Better CPUs.