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

#711

Post by bonestamp2 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

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.

Even in the US, the prices are just too high. A well apointed M2 pro is over $5,000. I used to buy ThinkPad workstations and high end intel macbook pros for about the same price -- the thinkpads have come down considerably in the past 10 years. Macs have gotten more expensive over the same time.

Not to mention, in the past year the price of almost everything else has gone up too. So, it's easy to see why people have less money to spend on macs.

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

#712

Post by matwood » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #609

twawaaay wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer isn't that simple. It depends. For me my M1 Macbook Pro has the following pros: * It just works. I detest Windows. I love Linux but lately I started spending too much time maintaining it, I have busy life and decided that taking care of my OS is a luxury and I would rather use something that is acceptable than spend a lot of time getting to perfect. * It is viable powerful workstation. I just conne…

> It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one Watching all this unfold as the DevOps guy was funny. "Don't go buy the new Macbooks, it breaks our build pipeline and you can no longer run production locall- wait, what's that? We ordered 20 last week before anyone even tested it? Sigh..." It doesn't matter to them. They're content spending 5 hours tweaking their Mac setup for every 60 min…

Macs don't have that much to tweak. What are people spending 5 hours tweaking? If it's building the perfect CLI, welcome to programmers and any computer set in front of them regardless of OS.

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

#713

Post by unethical_ban » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

ralfn wrote: post #161

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.

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…

They probably don't want the grey market to flourish, where Indian MacBooks sell for $700 locally and get shipped to the US in an eBay transaction. Geo-locking a laptop in the modern world is impractical if not impossible and would have its own PR issues.

There can't be a grey market if you charge the same price globally.

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

#714

Post by Google234 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

EU forces a 2 year warranty compared to the us 1 year one so that adds some cost

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

#715

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

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?…

> How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?

Very often! I'm not an Apple person, but every laptop I've ever owned has kept going strong well past the 10 year mark.

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

#716

Post by alchemist1e9 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #412

Aunche wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America on the internet is different from America in real life. The Americans work 34.5 hours a week. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP

> America on the internet is different from America in real life. Implying I don't know America in real life, never lived there, never visited and don't know actual people there. All not being true. I have zero friends in my home country who work multiple jobs. I have multiple in the US. > The Americans work 34.5 hours a week. In my country it's 32. So almost 8% less. Which I'd call significant if working hours is di…

> And a society that burdens people with debt causing them to work every waking moment while avoiding costly things like health care, because they might miss a day of work or become even more indebted through the cost of said health care. People just pick up opioids so they can handle the pain and keep working two jobs.

In the bottom 10-15% of the society there is some truth to what you wrote. However are you sure you are comparing that with the same segment in your country?

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

#717

Post by asow92 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

> My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm replacing it with a Framework laptop.

IMHO, the Mac and Framework are different products for different people: The Mac is for generalists who just need a computer that's easy to use and gets things done whereas the framework is for techies who need to get things done, but also care about open architecture, upgradability, and tinkering with esoteric Linux distros.

Many of these generalists on the Mac side don't need more than a web browser for most of their tasks and are willing to pay more because they don't want to care about the details: they just want a computer that works.

This isn't to say one or the other is better, but that they are solving for fundamentally different problems.

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

#718

Post by babypuncher » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:55 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…

Doom and gloom stories generate clicks. So they'd rather focus on the inflation we are experiencing rather than point out how much better we are doing right now than literally everyone else.

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

#719

Post by KptMarchewa » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

stametseater wrote: post #669

smoldesu wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or just not caring about any data you have locally.

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

#720

Post by lern_too_spel » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

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.

MacBooks aren't made in the US, so the strength of the US dollar has nothing to do with it (except to make the dollar cost of producing them go down).