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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

#161

Post by ralfn »

masklinn wrote: post #56
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.

Yep, and that’s always been an issue with Apple products: they set their prices in USD, then set the foreign price using conversions from around release date (plus taxes obviously). That means if the dollar was very strong at release, the machines get very expensive in foreign currency.

Which is weird, because barely any part of it is produced in the US. So it's not that their costs are going up.

They are just not realizing they are self sabotaging in terms of opportunity costs.

If they adjust prices to purchasing power, with at least 30% profit marge, windows laptops and chromebooks would be having crisis talks right about now.

People would prefer the Apple stuff, but not at that price. Even if you can easily afford it, if you are from a protestant nation, you couldn't live with yourself spending your money so irresponsibly. The value deal isn't there, unless you are using it professionally. But for leisure? No way.

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

#162

Post by Clubber »

patatero wrote: post #92
Dalewyn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has and uses an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM, I agree it's not a lot but it's more than sufficient for any use case a Macbook Air would generally see. This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum. I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?

> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum. wut. I have a 16GB Windows machine and it's fine.

I think he was being intentionally hyperbolic, alluding to the fact that Windows' published minimum specs are way to low (like Vista) and the actual specs needed to run are much higher because the bloat.

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

#163

Post by lakecresva »

re-thc wrote: post #127
lakecresva wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the way consumers perceive your pricing matters. If you lose a key, you need to call a locksmith; it's rare that someone needs to buy a new apple laptop.

Is it rare? There are so many startups that come and go and they buy laptops (new) for employees...

Sure, and their options include literally everything else on the market, including older macbooks. You're missing the point by a mile.

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

#164

Post by chii »

piva00 wrote: post #152
ghostwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a mac air is a luxury item, and its pricing reflects that.

I don't think it's absurd at all. A similarly capable laptop could be had for a much lower price, so people that complain they cannot get this luxury item for an "affordable" price just sounds entitled to me.

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

#165

Post by zarzavat »

masklinn wrote: post #45
samhuk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Software also uses a lot more RAM than it did 10 years ago.

10 years ago I lived easily inside 8GB with all native apps.

Nowadays I have 16GB and I’m constantly running into swap. That’s without running any demanding workloads. Granted the swap is a lot faster with modern SSDs, but it’s not good for the drive.

Apple thinks that anyone who needs more than 16GB of RAM is a professional color grader or audio producer or something. But I just want to run Discord.

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

#166

Post by brnewd »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #44
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 compa…

This is probably not far off. I regularly do software development on my Samsung phone using Samsung Dex plugged to a monitor. Sometimes even without a monitor, just a wireless keyboard and mouse.

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

#167

Post by brnewd »

skc wrote: post #47

Aren't people keeping their PC's for far longer nowadays? In my experience they are far less brittle and far more capable than they used to be and we spend most of our time either running web browsers on them.

Yep, still on an 8 year old laptop with no signs of slowing down.

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

#168

Post by lifty »

vardump wrote: post #159
lifty wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mem…

Better to use Activity Monitor, as simple as that might be.

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

#169

Post by Dalewyn »

mgraupner wrote: post #93
ricardobayes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple: 500 nits display, whole working day battery, fans almost never on, much higher resale value. Might be worth it for some people.

That combined with the best speakers you will ever hear in a laptop, keyboard and touchpad you know will be at least decent (ye olde butterfly notwithstanding), the steep price tag kind of sort of starts to partially make a bit more sense.

The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.

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