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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

#201

Post by f6v »

hankchinaski wrote: post #12

The only way I buy new MacBooks now is I try to keep it as long as possible as upgrade only to the oldest and cheapest available model. Last time I bought a m1 Mac air for a bargain price. That’s the only way I’m getting real value. The newest models are simply overpriced. Until they launch something new and discount the current models to a decent price. Same goes for iphones

> The newest models are simply overpriced.

They are expensive, but in the same range as other manufacturers in the similar segment. It’s just that Apple doesn’t make a cheap laptop, unlike Lenovos and HPs.

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

#202

Post by windowsrookie »

mschuster91 wrote: post #61
avidphantasm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did this. I had a 2019 16” i9 that I replaced with a 14” M1 Pro as soon as I could because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had. The M1 Pro is probably the best.

> because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had. I'm running the same machine, but for me it's the best Mac I ever had. Decent keyboard very similar to my prior 2015 MBP, larger screen while at the same time keeping the exterior footprint of the 2015, it can run virtually everything you throw at it (sans 32-bit legacy games, but not because of the h…

Same for me. My 2018 15" MacBook Pro has been great. I use it every day and have had almost zero issues with it. It has the "bad" keyboard and it is only now starting to act up. I still have AppleCare on it and plan to bring it in and have the keyboard replaced. Hopefully it will last another 5 years after that. I do suspect it will only get one more MacOs update though. But, I have some older machines that still run just fine on Catalina.

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

#203

Post by blagie »

snapcaster wrote: post #160
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.

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…

I think the key problem is anchoring from low-end prices.

If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.

Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.

From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.

From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.

Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).

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

#204

Post by stnmtn »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #194
enlyth wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The returns are diminishing Always has been. Buying top of the line technology is paying an early adopter penalty. People talk about FPS (frames per second) with gaming PC's and I think its an unnoticeable arms race about numbers. If the human eye can't observe more than 60 FPS and you aren't playing competitively (aka professionally) what will that extra FPS boost get you? Paying for bragging rights (ironic observ…

I agree that there are diminishing returns, but I can promise you that it's easy to stop a difference between 60 FPS and 144 FPS if you have a 144hz monitor. I don't think anyone actually believes that 60 FPS is the "limit of the human eye"

Paying for that difference makes sense for some games/genres. For some that doesn't matter.

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

#205

Post by masklinn »

JCharante wrote: post #176
masklinn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is a good alternative? Should it be indexed off the price of gold?

Most companies will set local prices based on local markets, and will react to changes in economics by adjusting prices.

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

#207

Post by coldtea »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of the tens of millions that do every year, and get the Apple, Razer, Alienware, Lenovo and others high end laptops... Which is precisely the market this batch was intended for, also

I assume the group of people buying Apple is mostly disjoint from the group of people buying Razer/Alienware. Maybe Lenovo has some overlap.

Of course they are disjoint. It wasn't implied that they aren't.

The group meant in my comment above was not the set of people buying Apple, but the set of people buying expensive $2K+ laptops.

And that's a group that includes buyers of the expensive models from all of the above manufacturers.

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

#208

Post by oofta-boofta »

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.

Same, bought an M1 16" MBP w/the Max chip, basically all the best specs. Unless there's a titanic shift in performance I probably won't be buying any new laptops for a while.

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

#209

Post by insane_dreamer »

GeekyBear wrote: post #5

Given the state of the PC market it would be shocking if Mac sales were not also affected. >The PC market has experienced its largest decline ever, according to analyst Gartner. Preliminary results by Gartner shows that worldwide PC shipments totalled 65.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 28.5% decrease from the fourth quarter of 2021. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252529126/PC-industry-se...

But was there a Covid related increase in 2020 and 2021? In other words, is this just a regression to the mean?
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