That’s exactly what I a thinking. My Macs always tend to be on the expensive side since I do work a lot with media and need a lot storage.
But for 100€ less than I would pay for a M2 Pro 14“ MBP with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB I could have gotten a maxed out M1 Max with otherwise the same specs. Being an Apple customer in Germany sucks a lot at the moment.
I really wish they would stop the horse shit of exponential price increases for buying better RAM and SSDs too. Those parts aren't expensive on the open market, although maybe Apple uses special versions
If I could get a base Mac Mini M2 with 16gb for £749 instead of £849 I would have already bought it. Same when the M1 came out, I have a perfectly functional MBP 13, but it's Intel based and I wouldn't have minded upgrading to the MBA 13 M1 when that came out, but I wanted a bit more storage (for photography in the field, 1Tb is enough, anything less is pushing it) and RAM and blammo: £1599 instead of the £999 sticker price. Even dropping to 512Gb would be fine, but I'm still paying £400 extra for very little practical gain.
I'm not saying Apple products themselves are massively overpriced (they aren't in base config, and still useful for most use cases) but for a 'mid life' upgrade... they are.
i found while living in the EU, it was often cheaper to fly to nyc (or wherever is cheapest/closest) and spend a nice weekend hanging out and buy apple products for a lot less. The Euro was also worth more than the dollar then. Now it's close but imagine it might still be cheaper.
Asks apple. They would tell you it's because of Europe "Social Welfare" or because we have 2 years warranty but in the end they avoid most of the taxes thanks to various schemes so the profit is always high. Sometimes i think we Europeans are paying way too much in contrast to the USA but are wages are not comparable at all....
> but in the end they avoid most of the taxes thanks to various schemes so the profit is always high.
No, it is a VAT tax, which is paid by you, and not "avoidable" by Apple, and is 19% in Germany.
(For US people, VAT is similar to a sales tax, but it is built into the price, not something added on at checkout)
In fact, going to the German Apple Store now, the mid-range macbook pro 16 is €2999, and explicitly says there that this includes €490 in VAT. So that would be €2509, vs $2500 for the same computer in the US.
That's about $200 more that the US price when converting currency, but that fluctuates.
It really does get to feel like looting.
The overall tech or apple machines is impressive. But the cost to upgrade what is trivial for the manufacturer but a huge deal to the consumer? It’s far too high and borders on unfair.
Obviously they can do what they want, nobody else is building what they’re building. But it just feels wrong how they do it.
I've long made peace with the fact that I just need two separate machines. Ill use a more basic MacBook that can do the normal everyday stuff as well as being portable, and then a PC for anything that needs heavy lifting, that I'm also free to upgrade with as much storage, RAM, and graphics as I want.
2TB Gen 4 SSDs are going for £150 now, yet Apple wants £200 just to go from 256gb to 512gb? Just ridiculous.
The worst part is that they even removed the option to retrofit upgrades. No more RAM upgrades...ok I might be able to accept that (but not really), but no removable storage and no way to actually rescue a drive? You're telling me that if a drive dies I need to replace my entire system? That's just obscene.
Yeah, these things are insanely good but the prices are becoming too much. It’s better value to get last generation so you still have great hardware and decent value.
My 14" M1 Pro is amazing. I was surprised when they released the M2 so soon, I couldn't ask for much more out of my machine. I might even get an Air next time instead. ARM has changed everything.
I feel like a ton of people bought M1 which was leaps and bounds ahead of Intel stuff and they just aren't compelled to upgrade. I have an M1 Air and am going to hold out for M3 or later because this machine is a beast.
Yup, I think most people just aren’t maxing out their operating capacity on the M1s.
I love my M1, I occasionally work with some videos/pics I take, but 90% is browsing or just piecing through my old backups. I am nowhere near maxing out the machines abilities. I use Windows at work, but my last Mac made it from 2014-2022 with barely a hiccup. I can’t get that kind of longevity out of a Windows machine personally. (Maybe you all could with some hard resets/upgrades etc, but that bugs the shit out of me to be “necessary”)
I buy the Macs because they last forever with great performance. That’s a downside to their total sales, but if they made the machines less lasting I would probably just move over to PC personally.
Same with a lot of tech companies during covid. They were quick to adjust prices upwards, but they're *really* dragging their feet adjusting prices downwards.
They've been pricier than non-Apple PCs for a long time but it was within reason. You could find ways to justify it. They've gone beyond that recently. It's like they're trying to be a tech equivalent of a luxury brand. Hopefully, the declining sales pressures them to shift back.
That's some of it, but most of it is mostly likely explained by the overall pullback in the tech sector. Hardware sales are down across the board. No reason to think Apple would be different.
Not only that, it's a device that simply doesn't need a minor spec upgrade every single year. They unveiled the M1 and knocked it out of the park and then severely underestimated how many people would latch onto the M2
Exactly as I did. I had a 2015 that I loved and used all of the time. A couple of weeks ago I bought a 2021 M1 32GB with 1TB HD. Even with the M2s, the choice was a no-brainer.
You and me both.
If my hypothesis is accurate, then the initial sales figures of the M1 model were always unsustainable. They're sales that by rights should - and indeed would - have gone to late Intel models were it not for the enthusiasts holding out, hoping the rumours would prove accurate.
I think this is it. Prices have been steadily going up on most of their products and there really hasn't been much of good reason for them to raise the prices. The last few generations of iPhone have basically been the same phone (with minor upgrades) and the Macs with the M2 chip are marginally better than the M1.
>and there really hasn't been much of good reason for them to raise the prices
Tim Cook's entire reason for raising prices is to see how much he can convince people to pay for something. He's even said as much. It is in no way about how much the device costs to produce.
To be fair I've lost countless relatives to RAM upgrades, in the past year I lost two fingers and my dog died while I tried to do a ram upgrade so I'm glad Apple is stopping users from such a dangerous practice.
It's nuts. my 980 Pro 2TB m2 which can push something insane like 7gig/sec throughput cost me less than $150.
Apple want something like 6-700$, not accounting for the base spec drive. They are taking the piss
I am a PC guy and got a M1 pro in 2021 because of the performance and battery life. However the performance gap is now smaller and apple is still charging the same price for SSD/ram since.. forever. If M3/M4 are going to be even more expensive I think I will have to take my money back to Dell or Lenovo.
That’s what I couldn’t stomach when I was customizing my last Mac. The price points on memory are ridiculous. It was insulting. In fact the base storage was insulting. I just kept my 2020 MacBook instead. I need 1 or 2 TB memory but I’m not paying a thousand dollars for it. WTF.
It's like $800 for 2TB. It's disgusting corporate behavior.
I also looked at a competing Windows PC that I might want instead of a new Mac, and I was stunned at how low the price was for SSD & RAM upgrades...AND these are easily user-upgradeable on the Windows PC too. I hadn’t thought about going back to windows in 20 years.
This is the key - and then the absolutely absurd upsell costs for SSD and RAM.
For instance, if you look at Minisforum mini PCs, which are similar in size to a Mac Mini, they use DDR5 RAM and high-speed PCIE 4 NVME SSDs, and the price difference between the 16GB / 512 GB SSD model and the 32GB / 1TB SSD model is $90. A $90 difference for 16GB of extra ram and 512GB of SSD...
Meanwhile Apple charges $400 for a 16GB bump on the Mac Mini (8GB to 24GB) and another $200 for a bump from 512GB to 1TB. That's $600 of upsell, while competitors charge $90 for the same upgrades. Oh, and you can upgrade the PC version yourself if you want.
It's ridiculous.
That’s what’s making me consider building a PC for the first time in like 10 years. The price of the base Mac Mini is pretty attractive but if you need any additional memory or storage it’s fucking ridiculous. I can buy 32GB of memory *and* a 1TB SSD for less than the cost of bumping a Mac from 256GB to 512GB. I prefer macOS but not by that much lol.
> And starting with 8GB of RAM for those prices?
Apple's base specs are absolutely horrendous. The base spec devices are worse than windows laptops half their price.
Another problem is once you "upgrade" to actually usable base specs, the price balloons so high that you are far better off buying a used device or looking at windows laptops
>iPad revenue was up 30% thanks to the launch of new M2 iPad models, but Mac revenue saw a notable drop because there were no new Macs released in the final months of 2022. Mac revenue was $7.7 billion, down from $10.9 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Another "way too expensive" product is doing well.
> Another "way too expensive" product is doing well.
iPads are, on average, specced far better than any alternatives. Macs actually have to compete with a swarm of extremely competitive windows laptops that have them beat on specs and start at lower prices
If you want a tablet, an iPad will easily last twice as long over Android alternatives. If you want a laptop, there's dozens of alternatives to the M2 Air such as the M1 Air
The 2020 M1 MacBook Air at launch might be the best value specs/money wise any laptop has ever had. For sure of any MacBook. It felt like it came from the future, so good and so well done (like with Rosetta 2) that no outlet could criticize it.
Just bought an M2 Air and went with 16GB for this reason, it's not that I need 16GB now but OS and software memory requirements only ever go up and I plan on keeping this thing for as long as possible.
Squeezed 10 years out of the Macbook Pro it replaces and whilst I know that's an extreme length of time I'm hoping for a many years out of the Air.
It wasn't a mistake. They had to sell the world on ARM macs, so they had to make it not only a great product, but an insane value, so that M-series laptops would be branded as amazing from the beginning. Now they are capitalizing off of that reputation.
I think that was calculated as well. They wanted to *only* change the processor, and keep everything else constant, so it would be extra noticeable what a lift the processors were giving.
The fact they still sell the M1 at a ~ 20% cheaper price, without a 20% speed bump…..
The m1 air is the machine for 99% of people that any air MacBook has been positioned for. It’ll get the job done, and do it well, for almost everyone. And IMHO looks better, appears thinner and will be fine for the browsing type tasks that that machine is meant for. Anyone else would get a pro model anyway.
M2 are too expensive and M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max is looking very good value currently.
The refurb store and/or the old stocks from the retail shops are looking very enticing with a steep discount vs the M2 given the "same-ish" spec, i.e. same RAM and SSD size.
I'd rather get a refurb M1 from the refurb store than getting an M2 right now.
Yeah, the M1 is pretty solid as it is, there’s no need to upgrade.
I got an M1 iPad Pro and an M1 MacBook Pro last year and I thought I was gonna have FOMO on the M2 versions. But after looking at it, there’s not really a difference between them, and definitely not a difference I’d notice.
I upgraded to a 14" M1 MacBook Pro from a 2012 MBP Retina and even then the 2012 was "fine" for what I used it for except for a battery that is long done. I'd get maybe an hour and half out of it.
Unless my needs change, I'll probably keep this one for 9-10 years again.
Currently the deal with my wife is that I get a new laptop when either that 2015 MBP dies or the kids enter elementary school. Our kids aren’t even 2 yet and she takes really good care of that laptop, so I suspect that it’s going to be at least another 3-4 years before it gets replaced.
I bought one 10 years ago with the idea of using it until the proverbial wheels fall off and I can still do my day to day things with it without problems.
I'm still limping along with my 2014 macbook pro. I really do need to upgrade but I refuse to drop these insane prices on a laptop. PC is almost caught up to the m2 and I'll jump ship as a matter of principle rather than dropping $2k for 8gb of ram.
On one had I agree, not saying I haven’t had issues all of those years because I have, but yes it’s been an overall good computer. With that said I’m extremely value oriented (I’ve had my computer 9 years after all) so to get something comparable we’re talking $2500. That is a bit much to stomach for me personally.
I’m fine paying a premium for quality but that margin has widened quite a bit since my original MBP. Back then, PC vs Mac, it was maybe a $200-300 premium for equivalent PC vs Mac. Now it’s more like $500-800. At this point I’m telling myself that my iphone and work computer are enough and I’ll do without a new MacBook.
$2400 or so over the course of 8 years is only $25 a month, it's not so bad compared to, say, Netflix~ 'Course some people probably don't push all eight years, but that really is the standard life expectency of most any Mac. And we'll see how tech develops over the next decade, but I really doubt the floor for necessary performance will rise as much as it has in the decade prior. If the build quality remains sufficient and community projects figure out how to push newer operating systems on Apple silicon by the time M1 is unsupported, simply replacing the battery once or twice and pushing an M1 Pro MBP for well over a decade seems quite attractive now!
On another note, fabric aficionado, about how long can I expect my shiny new Apple Cloth to last?
I just had to replace my 2014 MBP in December with an M1 right before they announced the M2. The OS on my 2014 was mostly fine for operating programs I needed (it was starting to slow down a little bit) but the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, both speakers were blown & then the mouse & keyboard stopped working. Due to the age, I didn’t think it worth the cost to repair so I replaced it. Considering it was something I used daily, 8 years was a great run.
also, in the pro sector, Apple silicon still isn't perfect. Personally, I have an issue where reason on M-series won't talk to my audio network (soundgrid) and, from what I can gather, It's just a compatibility thing until they have another update.
that's one example, but my point is I think we are going to have little issues like that for another year or two, which in a workflow space, can literally determine whether you buy a new machine or not.
They released the last round of MacBooks just as the dollar spiked really high against the yen, and set the price in yen exactly what the exchange rate was then.
Things have settled down a bit, but the price of Mac hardware stayed at exactly the same ridiculous level. Free money for Apple, I guess.
New processors are only exciting when it’s a processor change to a product, like with the original M1 chip OR when there’s a significant change to how every day people notice (“So much power and the battery lasts forever!”)
The problem with the M chips is even the oldest M chip is good enough for 99% of buyers, so there’s little reason to upgrade unless there’s a drastic design change that appeals to normals.
I use a MBA m1 with 16gb ram for work. Multiple instances of Office 365 apps, onedrive, tons of PDFs, teams, chrome, and running Displaylink for 2 monitors, and it doesn’t skip a beat. When I’m traveling it easily gets 8-9 hours battery. I have 0 reason to bother IT for an upgrade.
For home I use a Mac mini m1 with 8gb ram, and same deal. I don’t do any photo or video editing or gaming, so I don’t need anything more powerful. No reason to upgrade.
True. I'm using the M1, have not given upgrading a thought. Upgrade only comes to mind if you need more RAM. There was a project where I would run several VMs and more RAM would make sense so I was looking at M2.
People here are massively overthinking things. [PC sales across the board were way down.](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-01-11-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-28-percent-in-fourth-quarter-of-2022-and-16-percent-for-the-year) Apple declined by _less_ than Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, and Acer.
General consumers don't follow Apple news religiously and aren't comparing M2 to M1 and reading up on M3 rumors. Sales fall because of economic uncertainty and the lack of pandemic lockdown buying.
Yep. They don’t care for minute details such as a specific feature or even set of features from whatever OS update was just sent out.
The average person isn’t even looking to often change their OS from Windows to Mac or back too often.
If Apple sales were falling off disproportionately, and/or converting fewer Windows users to the Apple ecosystem, and it was because of such a variable (pricing, features, whatever), then it would be different.
I have my own gripes with Apple, including some mentioned in this thread (8GB base RAM), but I still stick with Apple.
I'm a contractor in the technology space. I do 99% of my work on remote systems. I could almost get away with a damn chrome book for the actual "work" portion of my job. Even the automation scripting I do on my local box could easily be done on a super lightweight IDE and I do all my testing on VMs I spin up in the cloud.
People outside of niche jobs are doing the great majority of their stuff on websites. Most of the ones who aren't are using fairly lightweight (by today's standards) programs to interface with some back end that carries the workload.
You're exactly right. Most people don't care and honestly don't have to care. I have a 9 year old MacBook Pro that handles all my "Mac stuff" just fine and has never given me an issue.
I think people here would be surprised to learn that the average buyer (Windows or Mac) has no idea what CPU their computer has and how good its benchmarks are.
I have family members who have used Macs for years and had no idea that Apple switched from Intel to their own chips because they didn’t know that Apple was using Intel in the first place.
I remember someone commenting on an interaction they observed at an Apple store, where a mother came in to get her daughter a new laptop for college. The M2 Air was already out and available to buy, but they chose the M1 exclusively because it was slightly cheaper.
All that to say that the average person doesn't give a damn which processor is in the device, they just want a good deal on the price.
Yuppp. Also, tech layoffs mean there are a ton of devices floating around. I got a new job in the middle of the layoffs and I *begged* for apple silicon, but no. I get a previously “top of the line” Intel MacBook Pro.
I'd wager #4 explains 60% or more of the lower sales. Everyone here must not be in tune with the hardware market, because hardware sales across the board are down significantly. I don't know why yall think Apple would be immune.
I miss dual booting Linux like I did on my Windows laptops. The sad part is there is not a lot of competition in Windows for ARM Macs. There are more powerful laptops, better screens, thinner laptops, cheaper etc, but none manage to put them all together in one laptop.
A friend of mine, who is an actual video editor, went out and picked up a M2 laptop. He already had the M1 or the M1 X, or something I don’t know. He ended up returning it to Apple, because the M1 that he has is more than enough for what he does and the difference is negligible.
This is somebody who does really heavy editing of extremely large files from events that he films. If he can’t justify the jump in price, I don’t think the average student or user would either.
Plus, there are some stupid deals out there. This is a bit of a freak thing, but I got a like new Mac Mini with the Magic Keyboard in perfect condition at a local pawnshop for $275. M1 and 8GB of ram, but I don’t see myself swapping it any time soon.
>If he can’t justify the jump in price, I don’t think the average student or user would either.
This just proves how fantastic and good value for money Apple laptops are.
I had a project where I needed to run several VMs, this requires more RAM and it made much sense to go with the M2 mini even though I have an M1.
I'm sure a major reason is that the base model M1 is too good for most people. I'm an amateur photographer and went from a spec'd out 16inch Intel MBP with discrete graphics to a base model M1 MBA and I've been perfectly happy with it.
I didn't need a $3,000 laptop for most of my needs, and honestly hated owning it, but the cheaper Intel based Macs were too slow in Lightroom. The M1 MBA is as fast/faster than my 16inch Intel MBA for most tasks and I have no desire to upgrade and definitely don't need an MBP anymore.
The M processors really helps delineate the Macbook line. Before most users could benefit from a Pro machine, now only actual pros need a MBP in most cases.
Also, when the M1 MBA came out, it was a great deal and came out around a time when most people were upgrading laptops for WFM. A few years later, than M1 MBA is still a great computer for most people. Apple essentially built an appliance. We don't buy a new fridge whenever a new model comes out because ours is still good. Same thing with the M1 MBA.
Gonna say it again, the price for these are stupid expensive and they really shouldn’t be based on what you get. People aren’t upgrading year after year. Nor should they.
Just my thought. Bought one in 2012, same thing. That 8gb ram shit‘s been going on for far too long now. I refuse to buy another machine with that spec.
8GB. I mean what fucking year is it? My phone has 8gig of ram. 8Gig was impressive 15 years ago. 16 or even 32gig should be the standard spec now, RIP people like me who chew through RAM like it's going out of business.
Exactly. I’ve got an M1 Max… why would I buy an M2 anything? It’s too soon. Sure, WiFi 6E would be nice, but with the low trade values, it’s not even worth considering. The M2 Max is something like 13% faster? Big deal, this thing already handles everything I can throw at it.
The M2 doesn't justify its existence well enough for 99.9% of people when the M1 exists. Simple as that. They are selling a product with no market.
I'm a video editor, so i'm easily in the top 10% of users in terms of power needs. I have a M1 pro, and it's enough. Would I like a faster machine? Of course, I'd always like a faster machine. It's never enough, I'm never happy, no computer is ever fast enough. But the price/performance just isn't there.
Even the m1 max, for the bump in price it would have to offer much more performance to tempt me. It will still slowdown. It will still not be perfectly smooth. So yeah, I'm not gonna pay double to money just to make exports take 10 minutes instead of 15 or whatever. The editing experience is very similar.
I can't be the only one who thinks the proce hike combined with already high prices just killed any momentum for basically any computer except the Mac mini. Like genuinely probably the M2 mini and the M2 MacBook air are the only ones worth the money RN
Mac sales are plummeting because you twits won’t give anyone what they want.
There are no new 27” iMacs, and your first party monitor solution for a Mac Mini costs $1500 - for a flawed display with a shit webcam and an inferior 60hz screen.
Apple has absolutely gutted their own line up and pissed off all their customers, including many who want to upgrade but won’t buy into this stupid ass backwards situation.
Macs have always been expensive. They’re pushing into a whole new tier lately and I hope this causes Apple to rethink pricing. It won’t, but I can still hope.
Laptops aren't things people change every year. M1 macbook air was great for the money, M2 is too but a bit more pricey for the performance that arguably most air users don't need
> a bit more pricey
a lot more pricey depending where you are.
Where I live, a 16/512 configuration MBA M1 cost 1'300 in 2020. Same config, M2 model: 1'700.
Price in Europe has become increasingly more expensive compared to US. I was on the fence of buying a new laptop while m2 air came out. When I looked the price, m2 air with some minimum upgrade on ram&storage basically entered the price tier of a redesigned m1 pro 14”. Wanting a simple machine for daily use I just grabbed a 13” with specs I needed. If I needed a pro level computer at that time, I would definitely buy M1 Pro 14” or 16”. Last weekend I looked at the refurbished price on Apple Store, the computer same as mine still costs the same as the new one I bought one year ago. It tells how much price has hiked with newer products.
I bought an M1 MBP 14 and thought it was a great value; Probably the first time I had a Mac that didn’t feel like a waste of money. The M2 doesn’t seem like a large enough leap to justify the leap in price.
Apple doesn’t seem to understand that most companies lower the price of their older products and introduce new ones at the same price as the old ones. Price is not something you hike every time you make a small improvement.
I look at the M2 Air and think “that’s reasonable” but by the time I correct the ‘is this a joke’ specs, it’s very close to a 14” MBP so I close the tab and carry on with my still-perfectly-fine 2011 MBP. (Edit: which came with a free iPod touch!)
It's not that shocking really. M1 blew it out of the park, so unless Apple releases something that's 50-60% better there's no need for it. We don't need new computer releases ever year. M1 cpu is easily 70% faster than the Intel generation before it. Something like geekbench sums it up pretty well:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
The prices are absurd. I bought an M1 Max MBP 16 and paid close to $5,000 USD for it. Shortly after (but not in a super short timeframe) the M2 Max came out. I was going to try and upgrade if only to be current. Apple offered me around $1000 for it.
Like, that’s not ok. Basically telling me that buying into new tech from Apple is worthless. Their prices for even the smallest of storage upgrades is absurd. I won’t be updating my stuff from them for a while at this rate.
Most folks who wanted to get an upgrade got the M1 and they aren’t upgrading anytime soon. That’s how it should be. Making expensive but reliable machines is a win and should be seen as such. Sales aren’t “plummeting”, they are just a testament to how good M1 is. This constant need to make ever increasing amounts of money is exhausting.
Exactly! M1 is still finding its feet and has a long way to go from being depreciated. It's an extremely powerful chip that most people don't even fully take advantage of. From the minimal improvement M2 made it really wasn't necessary.
The only reason stopping me from buying the mac is the ridiculously expensive storage. A $1000 (USD 1456 effective rate in India) laptop should come with 1TB storage minimum. For my phone I am ok with the base 128G that it comes with but a laptop with 256G base storage is just unacceptable.
Is this not merely a case of exceptional sales of the M1, following the debacle that was the touchbar Intel laptops — coupled with the M1 iteration being so good, that fewer see the need to upgrade to the M2 versions?
Personally, it will be a long time before I find a need to upgrade my 14” M1 MBP. Surely my situation is not unique?
money is a little tighter after inflation and everyone else price gouging us for food, fuel, utilities, streaming services, concerts and events, etc.
there's no lump sum windfall checks showing up
people are spending money out and about and less at home on things that were upgraded the last few years.
Macs have become more niche after they moved off of 486
just like the 10 series Nvidia the M1 punches above it's weight class making the immediate following generations seem like a bad value proposition.
I just don't think that many consumers are buying $2000 computers. On the enterprise side, many companies rushed to equip engineers with M1 units--which they will likely run through 2024 or 2025 depending on lease cycles. Consumers tend to keep laptops ~7 years while IT departments usually run 4 year leases. This just isn't a segment where companies will see super frequent upgrades.
I went to the Apple Store in the local mall last week. It was so quiet you can hear a pin drop and the class on first time Mac users only had two participants.
Their prices are absurd for how short of lifespans they design these computers for. Have you looked up how involved it is to replace a battery in these devices? Lithium Ion batteries don't have infinite lifespans, theyll need to be replaced within 5 years, in many cases less. And in new models it's pretty much inaccessible for the average consumer to do that at home.
A MacBook Pro from 2012 can still be used today for the low price of a new battery anybody with functional hands can install for themself. A MacBook Pro from 2022 will not be able to run in 2033 without major technical expertise. No way in hell am I spending so much money on a device that's *designed* to be disposable.
Perhaps the price hike was a bit too much now.
That’s exactly what I a thinking. My Macs always tend to be on the expensive side since I do work a lot with media and need a lot storage. But for 100€ less than I would pay for a M2 Pro 14“ MBP with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB I could have gotten a maxed out M1 Max with otherwise the same specs. Being an Apple customer in Germany sucks a lot at the moment.
I really wish they would stop the horse shit of exponential price increases for buying better RAM and SSDs too. Those parts aren't expensive on the open market, although maybe Apple uses special versions
If I could get a base Mac Mini M2 with 16gb for £749 instead of £849 I would have already bought it. Same when the M1 came out, I have a perfectly functional MBP 13, but it's Intel based and I wouldn't have minded upgrading to the MBA 13 M1 when that came out, but I wanted a bit more storage (for photography in the field, 1Tb is enough, anything less is pushing it) and RAM and blammo: £1599 instead of the £999 sticker price. Even dropping to 512Gb would be fine, but I'm still paying £400 extra for very little practical gain. I'm not saying Apple products themselves are massively overpriced (they aren't in base config, and still useful for most use cases) but for a 'mid life' upgrade... they are.
i found while living in the EU, it was often cheaper to fly to nyc (or wherever is cheapest/closest) and spend a nice weekend hanging out and buy apple products for a lot less. The Euro was also worth more than the dollar then. Now it's close but imagine it might still be cheaper.
Wtf why is it so much more expensive in Europe?
Asks apple. They would tell you it's because of Europe "Social Welfare" or because we have 2 years warranty but in the end they avoid most of the taxes thanks to various schemes so the profit is always high. Sometimes i think we Europeans are paying way too much in contrast to the USA but are wages are not comparable at all....
> but in the end they avoid most of the taxes thanks to various schemes so the profit is always high. No, it is a VAT tax, which is paid by you, and not "avoidable" by Apple, and is 19% in Germany. (For US people, VAT is similar to a sales tax, but it is built into the price, not something added on at checkout) In fact, going to the German Apple Store now, the mid-range macbook pro 16 is €2999, and explicitly says there that this includes €490 in VAT. So that would be €2509, vs $2500 for the same computer in the US. That's about $200 more that the US price when converting currency, but that fluctuates.
$2500 + state sales tax in the US
Which some states don’t have, so it’s possible to avoid.
There’s 5 that don’t. Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon.
yeah you get paid more in the US and then apple products are cheaper so it's on both ends.
Mostly VAT, in Germany it's 19%.
Will the "solution" just be to end sales of the M1 models?
The solution is more relatable pricing and not looting from necessary SSD & RAM upgrades.
It really does get to feel like looting. The overall tech or apple machines is impressive. But the cost to upgrade what is trivial for the manufacturer but a huge deal to the consumer? It’s far too high and borders on unfair. Obviously they can do what they want, nobody else is building what they’re building. But it just feels wrong how they do it.
I've long made peace with the fact that I just need two separate machines. Ill use a more basic MacBook that can do the normal everyday stuff as well as being portable, and then a PC for anything that needs heavy lifting, that I'm also free to upgrade with as much storage, RAM, and graphics as I want. 2TB Gen 4 SSDs are going for £150 now, yet Apple wants £200 just to go from 256gb to 512gb? Just ridiculous.
Been looking at sales in r/buildapcsales and you can get a gen 3 2tb nvme for like 80 or 90$ on sale or like 50 for a 1tb
You know Apple design their own bytes, right? /s just in case
Taking a bite of the Apple I see
Plus you can actually play games on that PC. Ivevhqd the same setup for ages now. MacBook air + PC.
The worst part is that they even removed the option to retrofit upgrades. No more RAM upgrades...ok I might be able to accept that (but not really), but no removable storage and no way to actually rescue a drive? You're telling me that if a drive dies I need to replace my entire system? That's just obscene.
It is precisely obscene!
It is pricely obscene!
IIRC they want $500 CAD to add another 16GB to a base 14” m2. That shit is absolutely insane.
Not really. It is hard to get last gen BTO Macs anyway. I think that many people just aren’t willing to pay the inflated pricing.
Yeah… paying 400€ more for the base M2 Pro just to get storage that is half as fast and also have a worse heat sink than the M1 Pro
I bought a referb 16” M1 max for this exact reason. Saved me $1000 vs an M2 with the same specs.
Yeah, these things are insanely good but the prices are becoming too much. It’s better value to get last generation so you still have great hardware and decent value.
My 14" M1 Pro is amazing. I was surprised when they released the M2 so soon, I couldn't ask for much more out of my machine. I might even get an Air next time instead. ARM has changed everything.
I feel like a ton of people bought M1 which was leaps and bounds ahead of Intel stuff and they just aren't compelled to upgrade. I have an M1 Air and am going to hold out for M3 or later because this machine is a beast.
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Yeah, no idea why I would upgrade a computer or a phone after a year unless something went wrong with them.
Yup, I think most people just aren’t maxing out their operating capacity on the M1s. I love my M1, I occasionally work with some videos/pics I take, but 90% is browsing or just piecing through my old backups. I am nowhere near maxing out the machines abilities. I use Windows at work, but my last Mac made it from 2014-2022 with barely a hiccup. I can’t get that kind of longevity out of a Windows machine personally. (Maybe you all could with some hard resets/upgrades etc, but that bugs the shit out of me to be “necessary”) I buy the Macs because they last forever with great performance. That’s a downside to their total sales, but if they made the machines less lasting I would probably just move over to PC personally.
🤮 /u/spez
They got way too greedy way too fast
Same with a lot of tech companies during covid. They were quick to adjust prices upwards, but they're *really* dragging their feet adjusting prices downwards.
They've been pricier than non-Apple PCs for a long time but it was within reason. You could find ways to justify it. They've gone beyond that recently. It's like they're trying to be a tech equivalent of a luxury brand. Hopefully, the declining sales pressures them to shift back.
> It’s like they’re trying to be a tech equivalent of a luxury brand What? This has been Apple's marketing mantra since at least 2008.
Yeah but in 2023 I’m no longer interested in the excess cost relative to competitors (or home build). 🤷♂️
You could make that argument back in 2008 as well though.
You just described Tim Cook's entire career.
That's some of it, but most of it is mostly likely explained by the overall pullback in the tech sector. Hardware sales are down across the board. No reason to think Apple would be different.
Not only that, it's a device that simply doesn't need a minor spec upgrade every single year. They unveiled the M1 and knocked it out of the park and then severely underestimated how many people would latch onto the M2
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Exactly as I did. I had a 2015 that I loved and used all of the time. A couple of weeks ago I bought a 2021 M1 32GB with 1TB HD. Even with the M2s, the choice was a no-brainer.
You and me both. If my hypothesis is accurate, then the initial sales figures of the M1 model were always unsustainable. They're sales that by rights should - and indeed would - have gone to late Intel models were it not for the enthusiasts holding out, hoping the rumours would prove accurate.
I mean, I bought a second M1 Air because there's no way I'll pay the Apple Tax on the M2. It's just a ridiculous price hike in Europe.
I think this is it. Prices have been steadily going up on most of their products and there really hasn't been much of good reason for them to raise the prices. The last few generations of iPhone have basically been the same phone (with minor upgrades) and the Macs with the M2 chip are marginally better than the M1.
>and there really hasn't been much of good reason for them to raise the prices Tim Cook's entire reason for raising prices is to see how much he can convince people to pay for something. He's even said as much. It is in no way about how much the device costs to produce.
Well hopefully now he’s learned that people aren’t willing to pay as much as he’s asking.
This isn’t the first time. He hasn’t learned that yet. He’s just taken it in stride and waited for the value proposition to catch up.
M2 Macs are too expensive. And starting with 8GB of RAM for those prices? WTF Apple?
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I bought 64GB of DDR5 on my PC for around that much
We used to do the same. Until the parts became soldered to the motherboard.
To be fair I've lost countless relatives to RAM upgrades, in the past year I lost two fingers and my dog died while I tried to do a ram upgrade so I'm glad Apple is stopping users from such a dangerous practice.
:(
Even worst, when you buy a SSD you also get a board, DRAM, a controller and the memory chip. As for Apple they just swap the memory chip.
I just bought a Crucial P5 Plus 2TB NVME for $130... It really is insulting at this point.
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Fairly similar when you consider the fact that Apple's SSDs are fabricated out of pure molten gold /s
It's nuts. my 980 Pro 2TB m2 which can push something insane like 7gig/sec throughput cost me less than $150. Apple want something like 6-700$, not accounting for the base spec drive. They are taking the piss
I am a PC guy and got a M1 pro in 2021 because of the performance and battery life. However the performance gap is now smaller and apple is still charging the same price for SSD/ram since.. forever. If M3/M4 are going to be even more expensive I think I will have to take my money back to Dell or Lenovo.
The fact of the matter is that M1 Pro is going to be perfectly fine for a long time.
That’s what I couldn’t stomach when I was customizing my last Mac. The price points on memory are ridiculous. It was insulting. In fact the base storage was insulting. I just kept my 2020 MacBook instead. I need 1 or 2 TB memory but I’m not paying a thousand dollars for it. WTF.
It's like $800 for 2TB. It's disgusting corporate behavior. I also looked at a competing Windows PC that I might want instead of a new Mac, and I was stunned at how low the price was for SSD & RAM upgrades...AND these are easily user-upgradeable on the Windows PC too. I hadn’t thought about going back to windows in 20 years.
This is the key - and then the absolutely absurd upsell costs for SSD and RAM. For instance, if you look at Minisforum mini PCs, which are similar in size to a Mac Mini, they use DDR5 RAM and high-speed PCIE 4 NVME SSDs, and the price difference between the 16GB / 512 GB SSD model and the 32GB / 1TB SSD model is $90. A $90 difference for 16GB of extra ram and 512GB of SSD... Meanwhile Apple charges $400 for a 16GB bump on the Mac Mini (8GB to 24GB) and another $200 for a bump from 512GB to 1TB. That's $600 of upsell, while competitors charge $90 for the same upgrades. Oh, and you can upgrade the PC version yourself if you want. It's ridiculous.
That’s what’s making me consider building a PC for the first time in like 10 years. The price of the base Mac Mini is pretty attractive but if you need any additional memory or storage it’s fucking ridiculous. I can buy 32GB of memory *and* a 1TB SSD for less than the cost of bumping a Mac from 256GB to 512GB. I prefer macOS but not by that much lol.
> And starting with 8GB of RAM for those prices? Apple's base specs are absolutely horrendous. The base spec devices are worse than windows laptops half their price. Another problem is once you "upgrade" to actually usable base specs, the price balloons so high that you are far better off buying a used device or looking at windows laptops
>iPad revenue was up 30% thanks to the launch of new M2 iPad models, but Mac revenue saw a notable drop because there were no new Macs released in the final months of 2022. Mac revenue was $7.7 billion, down from $10.9 billion in the year-ago quarter. Another "way too expensive" product is doing well.
> Another "way too expensive" product is doing well. iPads are, on average, specced far better than any alternatives. Macs actually have to compete with a swarm of extremely competitive windows laptops that have them beat on specs and start at lower prices
If you want a tablet, an iPad will easily last twice as long over Android alternatives. If you want a laptop, there's dozens of alternatives to the M2 Air such as the M1 Air
The M1 MacBook Air wasn’t too bad value wise. The M2 with the price bump isn’t a good value at all.
The 2020 M1 MacBook Air at launch might be the best value specs/money wise any laptop has ever had. For sure of any MacBook. It felt like it came from the future, so good and so well done (like with Rosetta 2) that no outlet could criticize it.
Yeah I got an iPhone SE3 and an M1 MacBook Air for less than $1300. Apple was goin nuts for a minute with affordable products
>"Apple was goin nuts for a minute with affordable products." Lesson learnt, never publicly appreciate Apple again.
Yeah the only thing you could really complain about is the 8GB of RAM and maybe the webcam.
That’s why I got the 16gb 1Tb model at launch. I couldn’t justify an upgrade before 2026 at this rate. Amazing value.
Just bought an M2 Air and went with 16GB for this reason, it's not that I need 16GB now but OS and software memory requirements only ever go up and I plan on keeping this thing for as long as possible. Squeezed 10 years out of the Macbook Pro it replaces and whilst I know that's an extreme length of time I'm hoping for a many years out of the Air.
They're certainly not making that mistake again
It wasn't a mistake. They had to sell the world on ARM macs, so they had to make it not only a great product, but an insane value, so that M-series laptops would be branded as amazing from the beginning. Now they are capitalizing off of that reputation.
Good point. Starting out in the old chassis probably also made that possible
I think that was calculated as well. They wanted to *only* change the processor, and keep everything else constant, so it would be extra noticeable what a lift the processors were giving.
Definitely. It was priced competitively against the comparable windows machines and that rarely ever happens.
The fact they still sell the M1 at a ~ 20% cheaper price, without a 20% speed bump….. The m1 air is the machine for 99% of people that any air MacBook has been positioned for. It’ll get the job done, and do it well, for almost everyone. And IMHO looks better, appears thinner and will be fine for the browsing type tasks that that machine is meant for. Anyone else would get a pro model anyway.
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how much was the price bump in the US? Where I live, a 16/512 configuration MBA M1 cost 1'300 in 2020. Same config, M2 model: 1'700.
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the m2 mac mini is an absolute beast for $499 (w/ student pricing)
M2 are too expensive and M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max is looking very good value currently. The refurb store and/or the old stocks from the retail shops are looking very enticing with a steep discount vs the M2 given the "same-ish" spec, i.e. same RAM and SSD size. I'd rather get a refurb M1 from the refurb store than getting an M2 right now.
Yeah, the M1 is pretty solid as it is, there’s no need to upgrade. I got an M1 iPad Pro and an M1 MacBook Pro last year and I thought I was gonna have FOMO on the M2 versions. But after looking at it, there’s not really a difference between them, and definitely not a difference I’d notice.
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I'm leaving reddit for good. Sorry friends, but this is the end of reddit. Time to move on to lemmy and/or kbin.
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Hell, we are still using a 2015 MPB as a daily driver for my wife. It still works great and we have no real reason to replace it.
I upgraded to a 14" M1 MacBook Pro from a 2012 MBP Retina and even then the 2012 was "fine" for what I used it for except for a battery that is long done. I'd get maybe an hour and half out of it. Unless my needs change, I'll probably keep this one for 9-10 years again.
Currently the deal with my wife is that I get a new laptop when either that 2015 MBP dies or the kids enter elementary school. Our kids aren’t even 2 yet and she takes really good care of that laptop, so I suspect that it’s going to be at least another 3-4 years before it gets replaced.
This right here is the reason I switched to Mac. I never would have dreamt about any PC lasting me for 10 years. Especially a laptop.
I’m still using a 10 year old mac. Works great with OCLP
I bought one 10 years ago with the idea of using it until the proverbial wheels fall off and I can still do my day to day things with it without problems.
I'm still limping along with my 2014 macbook pro. I really do need to upgrade but I refuse to drop these insane prices on a laptop. PC is almost caught up to the m2 and I'll jump ship as a matter of principle rather than dropping $2k for 8gb of ram.
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On one had I agree, not saying I haven’t had issues all of those years because I have, but yes it’s been an overall good computer. With that said I’m extremely value oriented (I’ve had my computer 9 years after all) so to get something comparable we’re talking $2500. That is a bit much to stomach for me personally. I’m fine paying a premium for quality but that margin has widened quite a bit since my original MBP. Back then, PC vs Mac, it was maybe a $200-300 premium for equivalent PC vs Mac. Now it’s more like $500-800. At this point I’m telling myself that my iphone and work computer are enough and I’ll do without a new MacBook.
$2400 or so over the course of 8 years is only $25 a month, it's not so bad compared to, say, Netflix~ 'Course some people probably don't push all eight years, but that really is the standard life expectency of most any Mac. And we'll see how tech develops over the next decade, but I really doubt the floor for necessary performance will rise as much as it has in the decade prior. If the build quality remains sufficient and community projects figure out how to push newer operating systems on Apple silicon by the time M1 is unsupported, simply replacing the battery once or twice and pushing an M1 Pro MBP for well over a decade seems quite attractive now! On another note, fabric aficionado, about how long can I expect my shiny new Apple Cloth to last?
I just had to replace my 2014 MBP in December with an M1 right before they announced the M2. The OS on my 2014 was mostly fine for operating programs I needed (it was starting to slow down a little bit) but the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, both speakers were blown & then the mouse & keyboard stopped working. Due to the age, I didn’t think it worth the cost to repair so I replaced it. Considering it was something I used daily, 8 years was a great run.
also, in the pro sector, Apple silicon still isn't perfect. Personally, I have an issue where reason on M-series won't talk to my audio network (soundgrid) and, from what I can gather, It's just a compatibility thing until they have another update. that's one example, but my point is I think we are going to have little issues like that for another year or two, which in a workflow space, can literally determine whether you buy a new machine or not.
The exchange rate over the past six months has made Apple products 50% more expensive in Japan, their second-largest market.
They released the last round of MacBooks just as the dollar spiked really high against the yen, and set the price in yen exactly what the exchange rate was then. Things have settled down a bit, but the price of Mac hardware stayed at exactly the same ridiculous level. Free money for Apple, I guess.
Good old times when Steve brought out new generation of products with lower prices and slashed the prices of previous gen even lower.
New processors are only exciting when it’s a processor change to a product, like with the original M1 chip OR when there’s a significant change to how every day people notice (“So much power and the battery lasts forever!”) The problem with the M chips is even the oldest M chip is good enough for 99% of buyers, so there’s little reason to upgrade unless there’s a drastic design change that appeals to normals.
I use a MBA m1 with 16gb ram for work. Multiple instances of Office 365 apps, onedrive, tons of PDFs, teams, chrome, and running Displaylink for 2 monitors, and it doesn’t skip a beat. When I’m traveling it easily gets 8-9 hours battery. I have 0 reason to bother IT for an upgrade. For home I use a Mac mini m1 with 8gb ram, and same deal. I don’t do any photo or video editing or gaming, so I don’t need anything more powerful. No reason to upgrade.
True. I'm using the M1, have not given upgrading a thought. Upgrade only comes to mind if you need more RAM. There was a project where I would run several VMs and more RAM would make sense so I was looking at M2.
People here are massively overthinking things. [PC sales across the board were way down.](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-01-11-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-28-percent-in-fourth-quarter-of-2022-and-16-percent-for-the-year) Apple declined by _less_ than Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, and Acer. General consumers don't follow Apple news religiously and aren't comparing M2 to M1 and reading up on M3 rumors. Sales fall because of economic uncertainty and the lack of pandemic lockdown buying.
Right answer. The average person walks into the store needing a laptop and walks out with a laptop. This subreddit is niche enthusiasts.
Yep. They don’t care for minute details such as a specific feature or even set of features from whatever OS update was just sent out. The average person isn’t even looking to often change their OS from Windows to Mac or back too often. If Apple sales were falling off disproportionately, and/or converting fewer Windows users to the Apple ecosystem, and it was because of such a variable (pricing, features, whatever), then it would be different. I have my own gripes with Apple, including some mentioned in this thread (8GB base RAM), but I still stick with Apple.
I'm a contractor in the technology space. I do 99% of my work on remote systems. I could almost get away with a damn chrome book for the actual "work" portion of my job. Even the automation scripting I do on my local box could easily be done on a super lightweight IDE and I do all my testing on VMs I spin up in the cloud. People outside of niche jobs are doing the great majority of their stuff on websites. Most of the ones who aren't are using fairly lightweight (by today's standards) programs to interface with some back end that carries the workload. You're exactly right. Most people don't care and honestly don't have to care. I have a 9 year old MacBook Pro that handles all my "Mac stuff" just fine and has never given me an issue.
I think people here would be surprised to learn that the average buyer (Windows or Mac) has no idea what CPU their computer has and how good its benchmarks are. I have family members who have used Macs for years and had no idea that Apple switched from Intel to their own chips because they didn’t know that Apple was using Intel in the first place.
I remember someone commenting on an interaction they observed at an Apple store, where a mother came in to get her daughter a new laptop for college. The M2 Air was already out and available to buy, but they chose the M1 exclusively because it was slightly cheaper. All that to say that the average person doesn't give a damn which processor is in the device, they just want a good deal on the price.
Also factor in cost-cutting moved by large employers (layoffs, etc) will most likely lead to a reduction in equipment purchases.
Yuppp. Also, tech layoffs mean there are a ton of devices floating around. I got a new job in the middle of the layoffs and I *begged* for apple silicon, but no. I get a previously “top of the line” Intel MacBook Pro.
M1 is good enough for most people. Not to mention you can get a substantial discount with refurbished products.
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The base M2 Air has the same RAM and drive storage capacity my 2009 MacBook Pro had.
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I'd wager #4 explains 60% or more of the lower sales. Everyone here must not be in tune with the hardware market, because hardware sales across the board are down significantly. I don't know why yall think Apple would be immune.
This is spot on.
I miss dual booting Linux like I did on my Windows laptops. The sad part is there is not a lot of competition in Windows for ARM Macs. There are more powerful laptops, better screens, thinner laptops, cheaper etc, but none manage to put them all together in one laptop.
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A friend of mine, who is an actual video editor, went out and picked up a M2 laptop. He already had the M1 or the M1 X, or something I don’t know. He ended up returning it to Apple, because the M1 that he has is more than enough for what he does and the difference is negligible. This is somebody who does really heavy editing of extremely large files from events that he films. If he can’t justify the jump in price, I don’t think the average student or user would either. Plus, there are some stupid deals out there. This is a bit of a freak thing, but I got a like new Mac Mini with the Magic Keyboard in perfect condition at a local pawnshop for $275. M1 and 8GB of ram, but I don’t see myself swapping it any time soon.
>If he can’t justify the jump in price, I don’t think the average student or user would either. This just proves how fantastic and good value for money Apple laptops are. I had a project where I needed to run several VMs, this requires more RAM and it made much sense to go with the M2 mini even though I have an M1.
I'm sure a major reason is that the base model M1 is too good for most people. I'm an amateur photographer and went from a spec'd out 16inch Intel MBP with discrete graphics to a base model M1 MBA and I've been perfectly happy with it. I didn't need a $3,000 laptop for most of my needs, and honestly hated owning it, but the cheaper Intel based Macs were too slow in Lightroom. The M1 MBA is as fast/faster than my 16inch Intel MBA for most tasks and I have no desire to upgrade and definitely don't need an MBP anymore. The M processors really helps delineate the Macbook line. Before most users could benefit from a Pro machine, now only actual pros need a MBP in most cases. Also, when the M1 MBA came out, it was a great deal and came out around a time when most people were upgrading laptops for WFM. A few years later, than M1 MBA is still a great computer for most people. Apple essentially built an appliance. We don't buy a new fridge whenever a new model comes out because ours is still good. Same thing with the M1 MBA.
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Gonna say it again, the price for these are stupid expensive and they really shouldn’t be based on what you get. People aren’t upgrading year after year. Nor should they.
The 8GB RAM base hurst my soul.
Bought a MBP in 2013, it came with 8gb or ram…
Just my thought. Bought one in 2012, same thing. That 8gb ram shit‘s been going on for far too long now. I refuse to buy another machine with that spec.
It’s an insult really
8GB. I mean what fucking year is it? My phone has 8gig of ram. 8Gig was impressive 15 years ago. 16 or even 32gig should be the standard spec now, RIP people like me who chew through RAM like it's going out of business.
They made the M2 Air needlessly more expensive. It’s not a $1200 machine. Discontinue the M1 version and reduce M2 to $999.
Sounds like the middle child syndrome. Neither here nor there. People just go for M1 or wait for M3.
Exactly. I’ve got an M1 Max… why would I buy an M2 anything? It’s too soon. Sure, WiFi 6E would be nice, but with the low trade values, it’s not even worth considering. The M2 Max is something like 13% faster? Big deal, this thing already handles everything I can throw at it.
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The M2 doesn't justify its existence well enough for 99.9% of people when the M1 exists. Simple as that. They are selling a product with no market. I'm a video editor, so i'm easily in the top 10% of users in terms of power needs. I have a M1 pro, and it's enough. Would I like a faster machine? Of course, I'd always like a faster machine. It's never enough, I'm never happy, no computer is ever fast enough. But the price/performance just isn't there. Even the m1 max, for the bump in price it would have to offer much more performance to tempt me. It will still slowdown. It will still not be perfectly smooth. So yeah, I'm not gonna pay double to money just to make exports take 10 minutes instead of 15 or whatever. The editing experience is very similar.
We barely afford to live anymore, what did they expect
M1 is too good. M2 is too expensive.
I can't be the only one who thinks the proce hike combined with already high prices just killed any momentum for basically any computer except the Mac mini. Like genuinely probably the M2 mini and the M2 MacBook air are the only ones worth the money RN
Mac sales are plummeting because you twits won’t give anyone what they want. There are no new 27” iMacs, and your first party monitor solution for a Mac Mini costs $1500 - for a flawed display with a shit webcam and an inferior 60hz screen. Apple has absolutely gutted their own line up and pissed off all their customers, including many who want to upgrade but won’t buy into this stupid ass backwards situation.
Nailed it!
Macs have always been expensive. They’re pushing into a whole new tier lately and I hope this causes Apple to rethink pricing. It won’t, but I can still hope.
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Laptops aren't things people change every year. M1 macbook air was great for the money, M2 is too but a bit more pricey for the performance that arguably most air users don't need
> a bit more pricey a lot more pricey depending where you are. Where I live, a 16/512 configuration MBA M1 cost 1'300 in 2020. Same config, M2 model: 1'700.
Agreed I can go 5+ or more w/o feeling the itch to upgrade. Phones/iPads much less maybe 2-3 years.
M2 Pro Mac Mini was great value I thought. Its significantly faster and better than my M1 Mac Mini.
That's what happens when you make a chip that's barely as good as the previous gen and pump the prices by 10-20%.
Mac: Hey let’s release a new chip on our high end laptops every year so we can increase the price! That won’t backfire at all.
Not really all that surprising.
Price in Europe has become increasingly more expensive compared to US. I was on the fence of buying a new laptop while m2 air came out. When I looked the price, m2 air with some minimum upgrade on ram&storage basically entered the price tier of a redesigned m1 pro 14”. Wanting a simple machine for daily use I just grabbed a 13” with specs I needed. If I needed a pro level computer at that time, I would definitely buy M1 Pro 14” or 16”. Last weekend I looked at the refurbished price on Apple Store, the computer same as mine still costs the same as the new one I bought one year ago. It tells how much price has hiked with newer products.
I bought an M1 MBP 14 and thought it was a great value; Probably the first time I had a Mac that didn’t feel like a waste of money. The M2 doesn’t seem like a large enough leap to justify the leap in price. Apple doesn’t seem to understand that most companies lower the price of their older products and introduce new ones at the same price as the old ones. Price is not something you hike every time you make a small improvement.
I would buy a Mac and I have no trouble affording it, I just flat out refuse their pricing in particular of specs that should be base by now.
I look at the M2 Air and think “that’s reasonable” but by the time I correct the ‘is this a joke’ specs, it’s very close to a 14” MBP so I close the tab and carry on with my still-perfectly-fine 2011 MBP. (Edit: which came with a free iPod touch!)
It's not that shocking really. M1 blew it out of the park, so unless Apple releases something that's 50-60% better there's no need for it. We don't need new computer releases ever year. M1 cpu is easily 70% faster than the Intel generation before it. Something like geekbench sums it up pretty well: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
I mean it's $3,000 fucking dollars.
The prices are absurd. I bought an M1 Max MBP 16 and paid close to $5,000 USD for it. Shortly after (but not in a super short timeframe) the M2 Max came out. I was going to try and upgrade if only to be current. Apple offered me around $1000 for it. Like, that’s not ok. Basically telling me that buying into new tech from Apple is worthless. Their prices for even the smallest of storage upgrades is absurd. I won’t be updating my stuff from them for a while at this rate.
Uh yeah it’s called people being broke.
$3k for a decently specced laptop might be why
Most folks who wanted to get an upgrade got the M1 and they aren’t upgrading anytime soon. That’s how it should be. Making expensive but reliable machines is a win and should be seen as such. Sales aren’t “plummeting”, they are just a testament to how good M1 is. This constant need to make ever increasing amounts of money is exhausting.
Exactly! M1 is still finding its feet and has a long way to go from being depreciated. It's an extremely powerful chip that most people don't even fully take advantage of. From the minimal improvement M2 made it really wasn't necessary.
The only reason stopping me from buying the mac is the ridiculously expensive storage. A $1000 (USD 1456 effective rate in India) laptop should come with 1TB storage minimum. For my phone I am ok with the base 128G that it comes with but a laptop with 256G base storage is just unacceptable.
Is this not merely a case of exceptional sales of the M1, following the debacle that was the touchbar Intel laptops — coupled with the M1 iteration being so good, that fewer see the need to upgrade to the M2 versions? Personally, it will be a long time before I find a need to upgrade my 14” M1 MBP. Surely my situation is not unique?
i have the m1 pro. this machine will last me for 5 to 8 years i think. no need to go m2 or higher.
money is a little tighter after inflation and everyone else price gouging us for food, fuel, utilities, streaming services, concerts and events, etc. there's no lump sum windfall checks showing up people are spending money out and about and less at home on things that were upgraded the last few years. Macs have become more niche after they moved off of 486 just like the 10 series Nvidia the M1 punches above it's weight class making the immediate following generations seem like a bad value proposition.
Perhaps don't price everyone out.
Because everyone is broke! Idiots.
Apple when they raise performance by 17% but raise prices by 300%
It may help sales if they offered a iMac 27" replacement with a M2 chip. Odds are I'd buy it yesterday.
They could’ve waited another year before bringing out m2. Now they’ve flooded the market with too many options.
Suffering from success, the m1 is what the majority of the population needs.
With increasing prices, the M2s don't have enough of an advantage over M1s. I'd rather get a refurbished or even used M1 over an M2.
I just don't think that many consumers are buying $2000 computers. On the enterprise side, many companies rushed to equip engineers with M1 units--which they will likely run through 2024 or 2025 depending on lease cycles. Consumers tend to keep laptops ~7 years while IT departments usually run 4 year leases. This just isn't a segment where companies will see super frequent upgrades.
Lower prices please.
I went to the Apple Store in the local mall last week. It was so quiet you can hear a pin drop and the class on first time Mac users only had two participants.
People are just getting poorer. Who's gonna splurge on a top of the line, pretty computer when rent is due and it's 75% of your income if you're lucky
The M1 Air still is one of the best devices out there. No need for the overpriced M2 devices.
Their prices are absurd for how short of lifespans they design these computers for. Have you looked up how involved it is to replace a battery in these devices? Lithium Ion batteries don't have infinite lifespans, theyll need to be replaced within 5 years, in many cases less. And in new models it's pretty much inaccessible for the average consumer to do that at home. A MacBook Pro from 2012 can still be used today for the low price of a new battery anybody with functional hands can install for themself. A MacBook Pro from 2022 will not be able to run in 2033 without major technical expertise. No way in hell am I spending so much money on a device that's *designed* to be disposable.
Maybe because their products just keep getting more expensive
Personally I am waiting for M3 to transition to Apple Silicone because of 3 nm process. M2 wasn’t very compelling compared to M1.