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

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

#471

Post by dboreham »

carlosjobim wrote: post #413
ajross wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary growth leads inflation in virtually all cases, and in this one too. (Realized I can still edit: reply after reply is trying to interpret this as a statement about causality, which it emphatically is not. I'm just saying that ordering is complicated in feedback systems, and that the needed salary growth to compensate for existing inflation largely already happened. This is doubly or triply true for the tech sal…

Salaries are only redistribution of current money supply. Inflation means an increased money supply and only banks can increase it, wether it's government banks, private banks, or both.

Probably because my mother was an economist, I've pretty much ignored the subject my entire life. However, your post piqued my curiosity. Some reading later, and I'm scratching my head: are economists really that dumb? The price of some goods must go down if the price of other goods goes up? Only in some simulation of an economy that doesn't include real humans, right?

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

#472

Post by wtallis »

myself248 wrote: post #342
arcticbull wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New macOS historically runs on devices between 5 and 10 years old. Longest in recent memory was El Cap which supported 8-10 year old devices. Shortest was Snow Leopard, which supported 3 year old devices. Ventura is lower, 4-5 years, but that happens periodically when aligned with major architectural changes. [edit] Honestly, their support cycle is pretty impressive. And just because they don't release a newer versio…

Why should 4-5 years be lauded? I daily-drive an AthlonXP machine from 2008. Nothing about the hardware requires dropping support. (Linux has, sadly but understandably, dropped support for the older 386/486/ppro architectures in the name of kernel sanity, but I wouldn't run a desktop with any of those anyway.) Dropping support for hardware that still runs perfectly fine, and isn't a heinous mess of architectural work…

It's one thing for the Linux kernel to still support 15+ year-old hardware (the Athlon XP was already pretty old by 2008). It's a very different thing for a full desktop OS to still support it in a feature-complete way.

Historically, Apple seems to prefer to drop support for old hardware rather than maintain a long list of caveats about which features cannot run on older machines. Throughout the Intel Mac era, Apple was clearly trying to raise the bar for baseline GPU performance to ensure the graphical effects really would run "perfectly fine" as you put it, though they were stymied by some of Intel's anti-competitive behavior. Their decision to drop support for the 32-bit kernel and firmware was quite reasonable, though the later decision to drop support for 32-bit applications was more of a problem for users.

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

#473

Post by ouid »

game_the0ry wrote: post #370
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…

FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it. How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?…

All computers last a long time...

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

#474

Post by beebeepka »

mattrighetti wrote: post #255
Clubber wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought an M2 a couple of months ago, coming from an i9 16". Oh boy, I know what it is like to have a hot machine :sigh:. The Intel version was stuck at 70C in idle, which is nuts. I think that that was probably the main reason of the switch.

Clearly they were making them horrible on purpose. Intel had a long streak of really bad products that somehow got even worse when put in Macs. They took away features an replaced them with crap. Then, magically, all the good stuff returned for the M1 launch. It's a mistery!

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

#475

Post by swedishfishes »

rejectfinite wrote: post #356
swedishfishes wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the curious Americans, Sweden has about the population of Michigan.

Makes us even more impressive ;)

No doubt :P But understandably doesn’t have a huge absolute impact on overall European metrics.

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

#476

Post by samstave »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #344
slowmotiony wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronics prices in the EU are simply crazy. Recently i wanted to get a small mini-PC that would be energy efficient and I could run some AI experiments on. Reading online forums, everyone's like "just get a mac mini, couple hundred bucks and you're golden". I check the apple website and turns out they actually cost almost a thousand euro for the 16GB/256GB model. But its the same with a lot of other electronics to…

They should have said: "Just get a used Mac Mini". You can literally get them from macsales.com for less than $100. The intel machines have not gotten much faster, but their prices have dropped dramatically.

When I was commisioning El Camino Hospital in Mtn View, CA - we had a bunch of digital art that we paid ~$1,000,000 for for the campus... but the digital signage solution was still behind in delivery...

So I went an bout a bunch of mac minis with remote desktop and just looped the digital signage videos via VLC.

I had to do this in some of the salesforce offices I built - like 50 Fremont, Chicago, NYC...

Mac minis were great for the 'bandaid' -- but even then were over priced and a pain to manage...

But I personally do not think Ill be buying another mac object due to appl fking me when my machine was under recall for catching fire, and my machine..... caught fire....

And appl held the machine for two month while 'investigating' and refused to honor the recall because it took them two months to find a moisture sensor that had been set off at some point.

The machine caught fire in my bed while I was watching netflix.

Appls solution was "well you can buy a new machine to replace it at full price" (this was LITERALLY what they said to me in the Union Sq, SF flagship store.

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

#477

Post by evandale »

game_the0ry wrote: post #370
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…

FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it. How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?…

My anecdote is the complete opposite experience. I bought a new 2012 MBA in June and the hard drive started failing on me in August of 2013. It was just out of the warranty so Apple did me a "favour" and let me buy a 3-year Apple care so the repair would be free. They made the Apple care start on the day I bought the MBA back in June, which was something that I got screwed on later on.

Then they recalled the 2012 MBAs because of failing SSDs in October 2013 and refused to refund my Apple care because they did me a "favour" and I got a good "deal" with getting Apple care because I shouldn't have been able to buy it post-warranty. It didn't matter that they recalled the SSD literally 2 months later free of charge, they wouldn't let me get rid of the Apple care and have it refunded.

In April 2016 the battery died on me and it was out of Apple care warranty because the Apple care was June 2012 - June 2015 instead of the August 2013 I purchased it on and being valid until August 2016. So that cost me another $250 to replace. Another repair I had to pay for that should have been free.

Finally in 2019 I updated to Catalina and it hosed the entire laptop which was working flawlessly before the update. It started randomly beach balling after about an hour of use and would stutter every couple of minutes until it eventually would lock up and turn off completely. Then it would randomly show the flashing question mark when booting up and it stopped working completely. The laptop couldn't even factory restore itself or stay on long enough to be restored over the internet. I brought it to Apple a few times, they didn't detect anything wrong with the laptop, and I eventually gave up on it. I still have no clue what that update did to kill my entire laptop but I was done putting money into it at that point.

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

#479

Post by [deleted] »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #55
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.

>1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years. That did not have enough ram 3 years ago... the fact they are still trying to sell 8GB as an useful amount outside of extremely budget laptops is insane.

[deleted]

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

#480

Post by bmelton »

anthonypasq wrote: post #449
joshstrange wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience since I first went from windows to mac. People always talk about the "Apple Tax" and it's real but it's not as obscene as people make it out to be when you factor in longevity. I had friends in college who were replacing ~$400-500 machines almost yearly while my ~$1,200 machine (2009) lasted all 4 years and then some. I only upgraded since I was using it professionally and wanted some more…

did you ever stop to think that maybe if they bought a $1200 windows machine it would have lasted 4 years. also macs were very early to hop on the ssd train and that was an insane advantage over most windows machines. I think that gap has closed substantially at this point.

> maybe if they bought a $1200 windows machine it would have lasted 4 years

Maybe it's different now (I haven't used Windows in decades, so I don't know) but I will say that it never felt that way to me. Perhaps because Apple controls the OS and the hardware, and has the ability to either spend extra time optimizing for older known hardware that falls within a support window or to delay a feature that would be problematic for older-but-supported hardware, but my lived experience with Apple hardware is that I get a lot more practical longevity out of it without having to work to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it.

Yes, I can always take a $1200 Windows machine and put XFCE or Xubuntu or Mate on it and it'll extend its life considerably, but as someone who has always tried to extend the life of my components as long as possible (the server at my feet is an Athlon FX) -- it's always just felt easier on Apple hardware.

It's even easier still with non-Windows PC operating systems, but ... has Windows gotten better on this regard or is that longevity still bolstered by migrating away from Windows?

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