this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Why is everyone making this a price thing? The way I see it, this is because Apple Silicon is so damn good. I replaced an Intel MacBook Pro with an M2 Air and I’m not going to need another machine until this thing stops working. People shouldn’t need to buy new laptops every couple of years. This is a win in my eyes.
Plus everyone bought new tech during the pandemic, and now it's over people are going outside and touching grass again so they don't need the latest tech just 2.5 years later.
Plus the M2 MBP is barely an upgrade over the M1.
Haha this is so true.
Saying that the market has reached a saturation point for Apple Silicon Macbooks is kinda silly. Apple Silicon is good, but it isn't some miracle tech that defies market dynamics. The only area that Apple Silicon really excels at compared to the competition is battery life, but there's a lot of other laptops that already beat it in terms of CPU and GPU performance.
There's still room for Apple to grow, especially since they're focusing on gaming now. The fact that Mac demand is falling in light of this indicates that there's more at play than just everyone being content with their current Macs. Even if that was the case, why wouldn't something so good be attracting new customers? Apple's userbase is still a tiny fraction compared to Windows. If Apple Silicon is so good, why aren't people flocking over in droves, especially since Windows literally has no answer to Apple Silicon?
Price is a huge motivating factor, especially since the economy's going to shit.
I just plug my laptop in most of the time so I don't need to spend 2k+ for "apple silicon". If I need mobile computing I have an android phone for that.
The amount of things a mobile phone can do is amazing, unless you are a developer who is away from a power outlet the use cases are dwindling by the day.
Or until Apple decides that, for some reason, your M2 can’t run their newest operating system and eventually apps don’t support your operating system anymore.
So like 7-10 years?
Can you name a major commercial OS that doesn’t do this?
My BSD and Linux installs will run on anything, but last I checked that wasn’t true of Windows or especially Android.
(Okay, you can technically install Windows on old machines, but is so incredibly bloated now that it’s impractical)
Well the surface pro 2013 launched with windows 8 amd you camnupgrade for free to windows 10 that ends support in 2025. So that is 12 years of support. You cam modify the windows 11 installer to install on a surface pro also
You can technically install MacOS on old, unsupported Macs too. I've never done it personally but I know people who've been running the latest software on long-unsupported hardware with no issues for years.
My MacBook Pro is 10 next year. It still does MacBook stuff last time I checked.
I had to search for how far back support goes for Sonoma, and it was surprisingly short.
I think Apple is intentionally shortening the support cycle right now to get everyone on ARM chips for a variety of reasons. They come with neural cores and are incredibly fast to their predecessors.
It’s tough to change architectures, and I think we’re frustratingly caught in the growing pains right now.
Official Sonoma support might be reasonably short, but if you've got a 2008 MacBook Pro, have I got some good news for you...
You mean in 5-7 years when those devices are completely outdated?
This is going to blow your mind, but your computer doesn't explode when it stops getting updates. You can keep using it as long as the tools you use don't specifically require a new OS. I know, it's crazy, but it's true.
This is going to blow your mind but from a security perspective this is the dumbest thing you can do
Older Macs often get extra security updates even after they stop getting new OS updates. But if you’re the type of person to use a decade-old machine, I suspect that security isn’t your top concern.
Also, you can pretty easily get new versions of MacOS running on unsupported hardware, so it’s a non-issue no matter how you look at it.
That's great but the initial statement was very ignorant
Not really, but you’re welcome to your opinion I guess.
That was true for windows machines until Win 11 started forcing the TPM requirement
Windows should generally be treated like malware for this sort of reason
But you already can't install MS 365 on Big Sur.
And? Not everyone uses MS 365.
I replaced my surface pronwith a surface pro 9. So went from February 2013 to Nov 2022. Worked well for me sll that time.
Surface pro 9 won't get replaced until the 30s
Just don't buy cheap shit
For a lot of people that's easier said than done, shits expensive yo
That said, I had bought a Sony Vaio in 2012 that just crapped out last year, and I replaced it with an upper end Lenovo Thinkpad that'll hopefully get similar mileage. Same with phones, I bought a OnePlus 8 Pro in 2020 that is still humming along seamlessly. Before that, I had a Nexus that I had had forever (and kept working thanks to CyanogenMod/LineageOS).
There's a huge benefit in buying high quality stuff in that they usually tend to last a lot longer than middle of the road/low end. Then again, I'm extremely thankful that I've worked my way into a financial position to do so. But alas, it's Vimes Boots Theory at work.
I still have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home, trucking along running Monterey like a champ. Absolutely solid little machine, that, but it ought to be considering how much I paid for it back then.
My surface pro 4 is still awesome and does everything I expect it to be able to do.
I'm not following — what's the cheap shit you're referring to here?
It's cool that you were able to keep your Surface for so long though. I wish more people would hang onto their tech until it actually needs replacing.
Cheap laptops. When you buy a quality / smilingly priced windows laptop they can last as long as a Mac book
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I often find myself pushing friends and family to spend a little bit more on laptops (regardless of brand) because I know they could keep them for longer if they did. I always remind them that it's cheaper to buy a good laptop once than it is to buy three shitty ones.
It could be that.
My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a "post-Covid" mentality, relative to their competition.
Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.
The M2 chips and presumably the M3 as well are incredibly sophisticated but they're not powerful exactly, they're just power efficient. They deliver excellent performance for their power draw.
But if I actually want to high performance chip I can get better options as long as I don't care about battery life, and if I need a high performance chip I probably don't actually care about battery life.
So it's good for people that want reasonably good performance on the go but no power use really cares.
The bigger point here is that if you need that kind of power, it comes with compromises to battery life, heat, and device longevity.
Apple silicon is just fast enough for most workloads you want on a laptop, and can handle surprisingly heavy video workloads. For anything more, a desktop is a better idea than a laptop anyways.
There’s definitely a niche for desktop replacement class laptops, but that is a niche. Gaming laptops are still king though. You don’t buy a macbook for gaming.
Gaming laptops are such a terrible way to game that I can’t think of a situation where I’d recommend one.
For budget reasons, get a console or build a couple gen old desktop for a cheaper price.
For portability? Get a Steam Deck.
If you’re gaming at the dining room table, it’d be better if it were a Steam deck. On the couch? Game on your console if you have one; if you instead have a PC, game on it hooked up here.
Doing non gaming stuff? Well, you probably don’t need a gaming laptop for that - a “productivity” laptop makes more sense.
And of course, that’s where MacBooks shine.
Admittedly I am in a weird situation where consoles and steam deck are both off the table. I am a bit of a framerate junkie. 30fps is unplayable.
Amusingly my m1 max macbook can actually hold 120fps in final fantasy xiv and actually has a 120hz screen, but those specs for the price would make no sense if this wasn’t also my main productivity system. The battery life, heat, speakers and screen quality are all huge bonuses in this case.
A steam deck would never satisfy me, so a gaming laptop would have been mandatory for travel if not for my macbook.
I see the ARM Apple machines as less valuable than the Intel ones.
Macbooks from circa 2007 to recently were PC-compatible machines, you could run Windows or a standard version of Linux on them. They were often well-built, and since Apple kept to a fairly limited subset of hardware it was easy to support them.
The M1 and M2 machines cannot run Windows and are pretty incompetent at running Linux, so if your hobby or job requires either of those platforms Apple no longer offers that value to customers.
I'm running Windows ARM just fine with parallels on my M1 MBP. Haven't had any issues, even weird legacy software that needs serial drivers works fine. MS did a great job with the ARM version of Windows.
All the higher ups at work used to run macbooks mostly because they were built well and looked good. But they ran windows because we don't make any software for Mac. An M1 is useless to them (our software is not compatible with parallels as the 3d support just isn't good enough)
It's not even that unusual based on the support queries we get.. still get the occasional salesman who has 'upgraded' to an M1 and has to be given the bad news.
I mean, sure, although I think the people who need to do that are a pretty small niche. But you could also just run Parallels and call it a day.
Right? Thats what “falling demand” should be attributed to. It’s a computer which will last years because of how capable it is. I’m not sure expecting people to upgrade computers year over year is the right metric for how well a product lineup is doing.
Apple Silicon chips are game changers, the rate of adoption is going to different compared to phones or a different product category however.
This is 70-80% of my thinking as well. I purposefully held out for an M1 Pro for a couple extra years. I expect it to be good for at least 5.
I run Al Dente on it, and the battery is still sitting at 100% health (I ordered mine on release day).
It’s light years ahead of the Lenovo X1 I had been using, which lasted me quite a while.
My 5 year old 2015 model macbook pro still works the same as the day I bought it. I have zero need for upgrading to a newer model.
Same with my 2012 one! However I am a video editor, so the M1 Max is my current system. Not sure my 2012 mbp could handle 4k video unfortunately! 😂