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Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#41

Post by mattrighetti »

pigsty wrote: post #30

The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items. Unsurprisingly, sales declined.

Probably also because a lot of people didn’t see the point in upgrading to this new M2.

I noticed that a lot of users also seem to go for a used M1 because it got cheaper and it’s still insanely good.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#43

Post by flappyeagle »

izacus wrote: post #36

I was just buying a laptop for my family and the prices of MacBooks here in Europe are utterly crazy. The crappiest 8GB RAM (?!) 256SSD M2 Air model is 1650EUR. 1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years. The 16GB model is rounded 2000EUR, which was before reserved for a high-end gaming laptops. It's bonkers.

Get a used m1

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#44

Post by JKCalhoun »

lenkite wrote: post #28

They simply need to reduce prices if they wish to see more sales. The economic slump means people have tightened their wallets.

A lot of finger-pointing at price in this thread (or how the M1 captured new MacBook sales) but I would be more worried about the segment in general.

I think we've all seen a trend among users away from general-purpose PC's and toward phones and/or tablets.

My bigger fear is that the rest of us, like some kind of ham radio enthusiasts, are going to become a dwindling market segment that fewer and fewer computer companies will continue to produce for.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#45

Post by masklinn »

samhuk wrote: post #18
tpmx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseline models are relatively affordable but they charge about 5x more for memory and storage than the prices of corresponding PC parts. That's been their trick for decades but it seems like the multiplier has been getting higher lately? $800 + tax for a 2TB SSD is insane.

I remember buying a Macbook Pro a long time ago (I want to say around 6 years ago? Back in the dark Ive days...) and I can relatively confidently say that it's always been approximately this bad. Inflation plus mental factors are likely the trick that's playing on some folk's mind. They always charged e.g. 200$ for memory increments and 400$/800$ for storage increments, IIRC.

The Apple tax on ram and storage has always been ridiculous, but a long long time ago in a galaxy far away you could use aftermarket RAM and drives, and batteries even used to be removable (and give easy access to RAM and drive, on the old polycarbonate macbooks). On my 2010 I could even replace the DVD drive by an aftermarket drive caddy.

With soldered ram and drives, Apple’s the only game in town, and that means the Apple tax is a lot dearer.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#46

Post by gambiting »

auggierose wrote: post #11
zarzavat wrote: post #2

They are overpriced to the extent that I am discouraged to even buy a MBP now because I would have to baby it so much given the absurd price tag. It would just end up sitting on a desk for its entire life, and at that point I might as well buy a Mac mini.

Buy yourself Apple Care+ for your MBP. No need to baby it.

Apple care+ isn't available everywhere. Here in Poland a basic Air is about 1.5x national average monthly wage and apple won't sell you apple care+ for any apple device(you can only buy regular apple care which is just an extension of original warranty,nothing more). So yes, if I had one I'd also baby it.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#48

Post by re-thc »

mattrighetti wrote: post #41
pigsty wrote: post #30

The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items. Unsurprisingly, sales declined.

Probably also because a lot of people didn’t see the point in upgrading to this new M2. I noticed that a lot of users also seem to go for a used M1 because it got cheaper and it’s still insanely good.

Exactly. Difference was minor. Too many jumped in during the M1 change (from Intel) to be upgrading to M2 now.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#49

Post by gambiting »

samhuk wrote: post #18
tpmx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseline models are relatively affordable but they charge about 5x more for memory and storage than the prices of corresponding PC parts. That's been their trick for decades but it seems like the multiplier has been getting higher lately? $800 + tax for a 2TB SSD is insane.

I remember buying a Macbook Pro a long time ago (I want to say around 6 years ago? Back in the dark Ive days...) and I can relatively confidently say that it's always been approximately this bad. Inflation plus mental factors are likely the trick that's playing on some folk's mind. They always charged e.g. 200$ for memory increments and 400$/800$ for storage increments, IIRC.

TBF Dell is equally as bad if not worse. A 128GB ram upgrade on my Precision 7670 has been £1800. It's insane.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#50

Post by izacus »

shusaku wrote: post #24
cubefox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Nvidia cards already had some kind of ML hardware for upscaling video games? Which seems them going full circle, since large AI models (except Google TPU code) are usually trained on GPUs, which were originally intended for games.

I was thinking that you’d need a separate chip so that there’s no memory issues when rendering, but I don’t have enough expertise in this

The Tensor cores on nVidia GPUs are effectively "a separate chip", they're just on die. That's where they can run DLSS and frame generation ML inference.

Separating them out would hamstring them, since they wouldn't be able to process the frames as they're being rendrered without performance penalty.

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