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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

#801

Post by zamalek »

moralestapia wrote: post #697
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…

>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. They are, though. I'm on my 4th MacBook and all have lasted me at least 5 years. The reason I upgrade them is to get more speed/specs, not because they stopped working, I even sold them and made back some small $$. PS The touchbar thing was nonsense, I didn't jump on that, as well as other gimmicks. Still the MBP is a solid option.

That's an anecdote. The GP comment indicated that they have seen this across an org, meaning more than a single sample.

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

#802

Post by jocaal »

sbuk wrote: post #671
Kon5ole wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. That was also true for older macs, which were cheaper. I believe that the Apple Silicon macs are the highest-margin macs Apple has ever made, since they no longer have to pay Intel for the CPUs or AMD for the GPUs. I can see no technical or logistical reason why Apple had to increase prices, and believe it is entirely driven by the idea that the market can bear it.

The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors. They also have to pay for manufacturing and logistics. TSMC have also increased the cost of manufacturing by 9%. Add rampant inflation and a strong dollar into the mix, there’s your technical/logical reason.

> The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors

That doesn't sound right. The m series chips are literally copy pasted from their a series and they operate at a scale where they probably get nice economies of scale. I bet they increased their margins a substancial amount.

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

#803

Post by telotortium »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #617
nemo44x wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a possibility that US economic dominance is about to go into hyperdrive. The USA is an impressive beast in this regard. It just never fails to lead and now with AI it's simply light years ahead of the nearest competitor. There's literally thousands of AI startups here - it's just amazing. Lots of people like to opine on the downfall of American hegemony and global financial and cultural dominance but I'm a…

Exactly. I see it like you do. I have yet to see quantitative numbers that suggest a downfall for the American empire. The discussion always turns to hyper political issues and problems, like race or guns, or healthcare systems. Yet if we look at more practical questions like productivity, innovation, efficiency, energy, food, … etc. What downfall? It looks like it is growing and I agree there is a possibility that t…

Transition from the republic to the empire

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

#804

Post by naasking »

joshstrange wrote: post #409
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?…

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…

> 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.

Other people have noted that shelling out the same for Windows hardware might get you better quality, but there's also the possibility that people who spend that much don't want to shell that out again so they take better care of their stuff.

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

#805

Post by rurp »

TrevorJ wrote: post #573
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…

I've run into this a few times with Apple. It's not that the upgrade is explicitly not allowed by policy. It's just that things are broken in ways which prevent you upgrading/using the device properly. I don't know if it's just lack of care on Apple's part, incompetence, honest mistakes or a stealth method of forcing an upgrade. In any case, hardware that seemed slow and outdated with Apple's software ecosystem now r…

I've had a similar experience, where supported OS updates rendered a macbook effectively unusable due to performance hits and bugs.

It's one of several reasons that I stopped buying macs for my personal dev machine and switched to ubuntu. Linux certainly isn't perfect but updates have been more pleasant than on mac or windows.

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

#806

Post by Kon5ole »

sbuk wrote: post #671
Kon5ole wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. That was also true for older macs, which were cheaper. I believe that the Apple Silicon macs are the highest-margin macs Apple has ever made, since they no longer have to pay Intel for the CPUs or AMD for the GPUs. I can see no technical or logistical reason why Apple had to increase prices, and believe it is entirely driven by the idea that the market can bear it.

The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors. They also have to pay for manufacturing and logistics. TSMC have also increased the cost of manufacturing by 9%. Add rampant inflation and a strong dollar into the mix, there’s your technical/logical reason.

>The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors. They also have to pay for manufacturing and logistics.

I am not convinced. Most of the development cost for Apple Silicon is already covered by the iphone and ipad. They always had to pay for manufacturing and logistics so that's not a new thing, and I bet they paid AMD and Intel way more than they pay TSMC even now.

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

#807

Post by zht »

kristjansson wrote: post #499
evandale wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 MBA…

So, as a negative example, you provide ... a laptop you paid $1500 + $200 + $250 for, and got 7+ years of use?

you see no reason with being forced to pay for a repair for an issue that was recalled for 2 months later?

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

#808

Post by burnte »

Dalewyn wrote: post #69
KptMarchewa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

98% of users can live with 8 just fine, and 16 is great. 32 is a waste for most folks.

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

#809

Post by 908B64B197 »

microtonal wrote: post #488
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…

Electronics prices in the EU are simply crazy. I did these calculations a while back on various Mac models and the price difference was actually not that large. The US prices are without VAT. Add the 19 or 21% of VAT that is typical for EU countries and it's almost the same. The difference grew a bit, because the Euro became a bit stronger relative to the USD since Apple made their last announcements. mini-PC that wo…

> Add the 19 or 21% of VAT that is typical for EU countries and it's almost the same.

These taxes seem punitive. For essential goods such as computers, that seems way too high.

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

#810

Post by buzzert »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #768
rank0 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US spends the majority of its budget on social welfare programs. Gun violence is a tiny fraction of death/injury here. You’re much more likely to die in a car accident.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens - higher than motor vehicle deaths. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761

Suicide is often included as a cause of death to intentionally distort this statistic:

> From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (_suicide_, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5%

If you control for this, and include rates of homicide using other means of destruction (i.e., explosives or knives), it starts to look a lot more even compared to other OECD countries (albeit still above average).

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