Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by manmal » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

I used an 8GB M1 Air as primary device (Safari, Xcode, Simulator, VSCode etc) in 2021 and it mostly worked out. I preferred it over my beefy i9 MBP due to various reasons. Sometimes I had to kill apps if a memory challenging app ran in the simulator.

Maybe your argument applies when running Chrome (?), but I had no issues whatsoever running Safari, and not even using an ad blocker.

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

#662

Post by FullyFunctional » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

seized wrote: post #273

makingstuffs wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree about the hardware but I have to say the selling point of apple is the OS. I have an iPhone SE 2020 and the screen broke. This caused me to use my QA device (Samsung S21+) while I returned to the city from the mountains. It was a horrendous experience. The camera is unquestionably better in the Samsung but that is about all the positives I could take from my week of using it. Android was just an abysmal…

Pixels are IME the Android equal to iPhones. Much cleaner and nicer experience than Samsung.

Security is not remotely comparable. Google couldn't even be bother to fix the glaring Wifi attack that their _own_ team found. I would be scared to own an Android phone, even a Pixel.

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBxBUIoeNYo&t=603s

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

#663

Post by kybernetyk » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

My two year old M1 Mac is going so strong I don't see why I should buy a M2 machine.

Yes, it has more cores and is more power efficient but the end user experience of browsing HN and running Xcode wouldn't be improved much. Not enough to shell out for a new machine at least.

The M1 is just too good. Unless Apple adds some insane stuff to the M3 I think I'll be upgrading with the M5.

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

#664

Post by dacryn » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

Popcorn3865 wrote: post #554

game_the0ry wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My own experience (4 MacBooks Pros) and that of providing MacBook Air and Pros to a dozen or so staff (with 50 or so on non-Mac kit) leads me to conclude this statement is not true. They are great as long as they work but no better in terms of longevity to equivalent kit from other manufacturers, at least in my limited, non-scientific, IMHO experience.

Last year I asked the numbers to our IT department for a similar discussion.

On about 2000 macbooks, 2000 thinkbooks and 6000 hp elitebooks, all of various generations, the macbooks scored best on reliability and best on 'how many tickets do these users create for our service desk'.

The cost savings are there. But obviously there was still a significant amount of issues with these laptops. They are not perfect, but they performed better than the other two families.

The big issue with macbooks is usually that if they fail after 3 years, they are an immediate write off. The others get repaired. Oh and those butterfly keyboard years were horrible and nearly stopped us from allowing macbooks apparently.

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

#665

Post by raydev » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

Everyone's talking about foreign prices and inflation, but foreign prices have always been absurd.

I think we've just hit the end of the COVID-era hardware refresh wave. Literally everyone has already bought new hardware they've been wanting to buy, the supply chain crush ended months ago. In addition, the number of people who were desperately waiting on Apple to move away from Intel have now all bought in. We've just entered a quiet period.

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

#666

Post by dalyons » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #598

dalyons wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people use SD cards these days, with the massive decline in camera usage.

The SD card slot is a pretty good way to get yourself a little more disk space - a perennial problem with students in particular. There are a couple of companies that make aluminum trays sized to exactly fill the sd card slot on older Macbooks and remain flush (there's a detente for sticking a wire in to pull it out. The tray has wiring for a microSD card. On that machine, I moved my iTunes library there. Since it's…

> a perennial problem with students in particular.

is it? AFAIK kids these days need less storage than ever before, because everything's cloud based. No one has itunes libraries, its spotify/applemusic subscriptions. etc.

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

#667

Post by dualboot » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #562

runjake wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am surprised I am getting downvoted Probably for this statement: > FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. and subsequently for this flamey statement: > You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product. FWIW, it seems like you got incredibly lucky. In recent years, I've been t…

The MacBook Air has been solid since inception, and that machine is good enough for the vast majority of people.

My biggest issue with the early Airs is that they were so aggressive with how thin the display is, that the LCD is often damaged by the bag you keep it in from the outside.

A replacement display is basically 70+% the cost of the entire machine.

AppleCare had to replace two of them on my Sandy Bridge MacBook Air. They blamed the bag I kept it in(when replacing it the second time), but they also sold me the bag.

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

#668

Post by danaris » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #565

ben7799 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same.. I have a 13" M1 that I bought right when they came out for a personal machine. For work I have a 16" i9 from 2021. The M1 is so much faster and nicer to use. Maybe if work gives me a M2 Ultra/Pro/Super/Titanium/whatever in 2024 that will make me want to replace the personal machine. But I doubt it. 90% of my computing is on my work machine and I don't get to use my personal machine for much that strains it. Th…

You have exactly the same home/work setup I have, and I have the same opinion. My 13 inch M1 kicks the crap out of my work 16 inch Intel MBP in every meaningful way that isn't screen size. And even then, I prefer the much more portable smaller laptop anyway. Quieter, faster, incredible battery life. I'm not-so-secretly hoping my 16 inch MBP will croak so I can get it replaced with M1/M2/whatever.

I had a last-gen 16" Intel MBP for work that started developing a number of frustrating issues in mid-to-late 2021, and was lucky enough that my IT department was able to replace it with an M1 Max in early 2022.

The difference in the experience between the two has been night and day. The M1 Max just handles everything I throw at it, only gets warm when I'm running something with heavy load for a long period, and never gets hot like the Intel MBP did.

Here's hoping you can get yours replaced too!

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

#669

Post by stametseater » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #575

dimmke wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I got lucky too. Because I bought a 2012 MBP (the first generation that had the HiDPI Retina displays) and it lasted me over 6 years of daily, hard use. It was still in decent condition but my job at the time got me one of the newer ones. Of course, that one had the bad keyboard and had to be swapped. 2016-2020 the dark ages but outside of that 4 year period (that Apple has firmly reversed course on), Apple's…

The #1 thing preventing Apple from getting into S-tier is user-serviceable storage. Baking on the memory? It's frustrating and gimps the device lifespan, but arguably unavoidable with the bandwidth Apple is targeting. Without replaceable storage though, every Apple Silicon device is effectively a ticking time-bomb. These devices will all hit their TBW limit long before they're unusable, and Apple refused to anticipat…

Constant backups are essential when using a computer without user-serviceable storage. That or mounting another [network] drive and doing all your work from that instead of internal storage. Otherwise you'll be without your data for hours if not days/weeks whenever something inevitably goes wrong (not even with the storage itself) and you can't simply pull the drive to continue working on another computer.

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

#670

Post by kristianp » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #74

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.

> 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…

The dollar's strength has much to do with the US leading the world in interest rate rises. Its not "dominance about to go into hyperdrive", it should slow the economy by hurting domestic spending and exports.