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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

#151

Post by pchangr »

ghostwriter wrote: post #139
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A base Macbook Air with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage costs the same as the monthly salary of my country's prime minister :D

Their monthly salary is usually on top of other benefits such as subsidized/free accomodation in their capital, food and travel expenses coverage, and so on. They definitely can allow themselves a new Macbook if they wanted to buy it on their monthly salary. Most of the time they get that for free from extra allowances too.

I think they’re just making a point about purchasing power.

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

#152

Post by piva00 »

ghostwriter wrote: post #139
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A base Macbook Air with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage costs the same as the monthly salary of my country's prime minister :D

Their monthly salary is usually on top of other benefits such as subsidized/free accomodation in their capital, food and travel expenses coverage, and so on. They definitely can allow themselves a new Macbook if they wanted to buy it on their monthly salary. Most of the time they get that for free from extra allowances too.

You are right but completely missing the point. The case is not that the PM couldn't have access to a Macbook if they so wanted but that it'd take the head of government of a country a whole month of their take-home salary to afford one. It's quite absurd, not the accessibility for the PM but to give a hint to how the average person of said country would definitely be priced out.

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

#153

Post by piva00 »

drooopy wrote: post #32

In my case, I feel that Apple has priced itself out of the EU market with the latest Macs and iDevices. The new base M2 Air begins at €1500 after taxes which is genuinely an absurd amount of money to ask for a device that comes with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively. The cheapest iPhone 14 starts at a bit over €1000. My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm…

Same feeling to me, I bought a M1 Air 16GB RAM + 512GB storage in 2020 which serves me really well to this day, when I saw the new M2 MBA I thought on getting one for myself and passing down the current M1 to my girlfriend but when I saw the prices for a 512GB storage + 16GB RAM I just gave up. There's no reason for me to get rid of my M1 right now, it'd be a luxury in itself, the absurd price just made it very easy to talk myself out of it.

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

#154

Post by brnewd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20
KptMarchewa wrote: post #14

M1 generation was so good that it prompted way more users to jump to it; that demand would spread over multiple generations if it was not so good. On the other hand purposefully gimping M1 would gimp ARM adoption. By delivering great performance, they've build up a lot of goodwill - people willingly port their stuff to macs.

I'm on an M1 MacBook Pro, and had to check settings to remember it's almost three years old. Zero issues, performs wonderfully, probably going to keep for at least another two.

I'm on an Acer 16GB/1TB laptop from 2015 that runs as smooth as day one (Ubuntu). I think the workload just hasn't increased much except for gaming and some niches like GPU workloads.

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

#155

Post by Sakos »

saurik wrote: post #117
Sakos wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC and laptop sales exploded during the pandemic. It's clear that these devices absolutely have their place and aren't going anywhere. I know it's popular to be contrarian, but sometimes the obvious answer actually is the answer. When you're facing double digit inflation in much of Europe and the Euro is falling against the USD, a 1650 Euro price tag for an entry level device simply isn't realistic.

Isn't the euro currently gaining on the dollar? It was heavily down last year, but except for a small recovery--which is mostly already gone again--the chart I was just looking at shows the dollar falling, not the euro...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/eu...

Seems to be going up again in value, but prices are sticky. MSRPs made when the it was down to 1:0.9 (USD:EURO) are probably gonna be permanent. PS5 was hiked up to 550 Euros. Even if Euro goes up again, Sony's just going to pocket the difference and move on with their lives.

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

#156

Post by Dalewyn »

enlyth wrote: post #70
GoToRO wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forgot that everybody bought computers in order to attend online classes and wfh?

Apart from this, if you're an enthusiast who likes to build their own PC, component prices have gone insane. A flagship GPU is 2000 dollars, and motherboards are priced so high that Gamer's Nexus decided to do a 25 minute video rant about it. The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DD…

>motherboards are priced so high

Only if you go for the really stupid RGB "gamer" motherboards sprinkled with more fairy dust than sense.

Something like this ASUS Prime Z690-P[1] is reasonably priced at just north of ~$200, it even has luxuries like 2.5gig ethernet and onboard wireless.

If you want a DDR5 setup, this ASUS Prime Z690-A[2] is still ~$260 with plenty of luxuries.

If you can do without a top-tier chipset, H670[3] and B660[4] motherboards can be had for somewhere around $100 give or take.

A quick glance at AMD's side of things also seems to paint a similar picture.

The only computer component currently way out of wack in price are GPUs, everything else is either reasonable or downright cheap.

-------------

[1]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119510?Item=N82E1681311951...

[2]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119507?Item=N82E1681311950...

[3]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119536?Item=N82E1681311953...

[4]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162055?Item=N82E1681316205...

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

#157

Post by Clubber »

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.

I bought an M1 MacBook Pro when they came out and I like it a lot. What concerns me about future revisions of the CPU is it will get hotter and the fan will get noisier. One of the best features of the M1 is the fan hardly comes on, and when it does, it's very quiet / low RPM.

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

#158

Post by piva00 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #145
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The dollar is insanely strong right now This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often. The recent BRICS currency move is about them panicking over increasing dollar global dominance. Checking recently I can’t find any major currency that is up against the dollar over last 10 years. US productivity is running away from the rest of the planet is another variable and with rapid on shoring of numerous ind…

Outside of Peter Zeihan, I'm also utterly surprised that no one even brings up the demographics debate. Everyone has been so indoctrinated on the "we have too many people" propaganda that they haven't even realized how fast birth rates have dropped across the globe (and they're dropping even faster now). The demographics of Europe, China, Japan and S. Korea are all terminal at this point. Outside of UK, France, and t…

> Outside of UK, France, and to some extent, Germany, most of these countries don't even have an immigrant culture to make up for the shortfall.

Not really true, for example: Sweden has been doing above EU average on both immigration and higher birth rates (for its development level) to account for the shortfall, it's not that clear cut in Europe as a whole.

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

#159

Post by vardump »

lifty wrote: post #138
vardump wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typing this on a Macbook M2 max with 32 GB RAM. Not all that much open and the memory usage is at 27 GB. Chrome, Teams etc. messaging apps, Xcode and other SW dev stuff. Kinda regret I didn't go for 64 GB.

I somehow doubt that. Look at Cached files and subtract that number from Memory used, and tell us please that number.

No "free" command. With "top" command I got this:

MemRegions: 1744370 total, 5771M resident, 234M private, 4726M shared. PhysMem: 31G used (2888M wired, 15G compressor), 74M unused.

A bit confusing even for someone who is comfortable dealing with low level kernel stuff...

I guess I'll need to install Homebrew, MacPorts or something.

Edit vm_stat says this. Looks like more reasonable output:

  % vm_stat
  Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
  Pages free:                                4070.
  Pages active:                            387530.
  Pages inactive:                          385599.
  Pages speculative:                          241.
  Pages throttled:                              0.
  Pages wired down:                        185222.
  Pages purgeable:                              2.
  "Translation faults":                 458286513.
  Pages copy-on-write:                   18032218.
  Pages zero filled:                    230111374.
  Pages reactivated:                      9982494.
  Pages purged:                           4086524.
  File-backed pages:                       197104.
  Anonymous pages:                         576266.
  Pages stored in compressor:             2007280.
  Pages occupied by compressor:           1062310.
  Decompressions:                         6355861.
  Compressions:                          10204603.
  Pageins:                               13150790.
  Pageouts:                                252630.
  Swapins:                                     52.
  Swapouts:                                 30380.

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

#160

Post by snapcaster »

ricardobayes wrote: post #79
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.

Meanwhile a lenovo is 800 EUR for a 11th gen i5, 16GB RAM and a 3050ti. As someone with a value investing mindset, I personally can't find the extra value for double the money in macs.

I think "commodity" laptop manufacturers have successfully tricked people into thinking a laptop is a collection of integers (16gb RAM, N core processor, etc) but I have NEVER used a laptop even close to as performant as the m1 and m1 ultra based macbook pros. You really have to experience it to believe it, it literally never lags no matter what or is ever unresponsive regardless of what i'm doing. Not to mention the full day battery life or anything else like that
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