When… have their products ever been competitive on price? Not even shitting on them, but there’s always been an Apple tax.
For the Mac Mini? The Apple Silicon line has always been a really good value for the CPU, compared to similar performance from Intel and AMD. The upcharge on RAM and storage basically made it break even somewhere around 1 or 2 upgrades, if you were looking for a comparable CPU/GPU.
For my purposes the M1 Mac Mini was cheaper than anything I was looking at for a low power/quiet home server, back in 2021, through some random Costco coupon for $80 off the base $599 configuration. A little more CPU than I needed, and a little less RAM than I would’ve preferred, but it was fine.
Plus having official Mac hardware allows me to run a Bluebubbles server and hack Backblaze pricing (unlimited data backup for any external storage you can hook up to a Mac), so that was a nice little bonus compared to running a Linux server.
On their laptops, they’re kinda cost competitive if you’re looking for high dpi laptop screens, and there’s just not really a good comparison for that CPU/GPU performance for power. If you don’t need or want those things then Macs aren’t a good value, but if you are looking for those things the other computer manufacturers aren’t going to be offering better value.
Mac Mini M1 when it was released was a good deal compared to same form factor machines at similar prices. Same for the M1 MacBook Air, despite the base RAM.
That advantage lasted a while, too, considering battery life and build quality.
Still running an m1 Mac mini right now, it’s a damn good machine, but the performance gains over the years on the m series chips haven’t really forced me to upgrade yet. As for gaming, I just use GeForce now to play my steam library and it’s awesome, it’s a really great combo. The 8GB of ram is lacking, but I’m using GFN and not pushing it too hard, so I don’t notice any meaningful performance problems. I’m also not editing photos or videos, so that probably helps.
Back in 2009-2010 I bought an entry level 13" MacBook Pro because it was fairly competitively priced compared to other options with similar specs, but the MBP had by far the better battery life, display quality, touchpad, and probably keyboard. It was easily worth the upcharge for those factors, so no real Apple Tax.
They’ve often been on par with competitors tbh.
The X1 Carbon isn’t much cheaper than a Macbook Air and ditto for Dell XPS vs Macbook Pro. The Macs have better build quality usually, but the PCs would get better specs. RAM, at least.
The Galaxy S series stars in the same range as iPhones do, though you get a better screen. But in the Ultra and Pro Max versions the screens trade blows and the iPhone is apparently cheaper.
When I was last comparing laptops a few years back I was seriously leaning towards the Framework AMD. It was clearly a tradeoff between Apple’s displays, trackpad, lid hinges, CPU/GPU benchmarks, and battery life, versus much more built in memory and storage, a tall display form factor, and better Linux support. Price was kinda a wash, as I was just comparing what I could get for $1500 at the time. I ended up with an Apple again, in the end. I’m keeping an eye on progress with the Asahi project, though, and might switch OSes soon.
I’m exactly the same, if I was getting a new laptop I’d be completely torn between Framework and Apple, the polar opposites. Part of me wants freedom, upgradability, repairability… And part of me wants a super high quality aluminum body, a trackpad so good you don’t even need a mouse, and whatever magic they do to make their screens look so good even if some PCs have higher resolutions nowadays.
Honestly, now that they put in a reasonable amount of RAM, with a processor that strong and some external storage, 600USD isn’t that terrible of a price.
I’d need to see what comparable x86 processors and graphics are to the M4, but yeah, this seems like it could be one of the first Macs in a while to be really competitive on price. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Fifteen years ago, a couple years after Macintosh went to Intel, I bought a Mac Pro. I had a hard time comparing prices at first, but once I finally realized I needed to be looking at workstations instead of desktops the Mac Pro actually came out to be about $300 less than identically spec’d workstations from Dell and HP. That was about the price of a full retail license on Windows Vista Ultimate (or later Windows 7 Ultimate). With Boot Camp and feeling like I could find Windows on sale for less it actually seemed to make the most sense with the added benefit of access to both Windows and OS X. It was frankly the best Windows machine I’ve ever used. No bloat, and all the drivers worked.
