The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is.
I could understand 20% more, but not two times.
Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs.
That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market.
They simply will never be mainstream.
My answer was to
I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead
I would!
CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.
I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again.
Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it.
edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
Heat, battery life, fan noise, etc have been discussed to death so I'll gloss over those. Past that, the other huge thing is the screen:
62.5% sRGB coverage is a really garbage color gamut. Supposedly the "G513IM-HQ088R" gets you a DCI-P3 screen but I literally can't find that model available for purchase anywhere to check what it costs.
1920x1080 vs 3024x1964 is about 1/3 the pixel count of the 14" Mac. Or compared to the 16" 3456x2234 it's about 1/4 the pixel count.
A beautiful high-resolution display and half a day's battery life, primarily. Also the ROG Strix trackpads are truly awful, but YMMV on that front
Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.
Or branding...
Which I can accept.
Which I can accept.
As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.
>I would!
>CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them.
Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally.
Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
Depends on where.
In Italy it's absolutely not true.
I am a consultant for an Italian University in Milan.
I see a lot of Chromebooks, people don't have 1.500 euros to waste on a laptop + rent + food.
Many students ask me what they can buy with their budget, that, on average, is far below a thousand euros.
