they also changed the fucking charger again jesus fucking christ this is unholy
$3500 for a pro-level mobile workstation isn't a lot when you consider it's a fraction of the cost of the software that will run on it. This is for developing blockbuster movies while the animators are working from home, not for browsing r*ddit from Starbucks. Here's a $6k Dell to give you an idea of this market.
Yeah, when you're using Adobe suite that comes out to $6000/year or Autodesk which can easily run $10k+
Yup.
But most of the people buying the software are using it work on corporate-owned copyright hell-shit as well.
It's a giant circle-jerk of money.
You're totally fucked if you're Indie/small however.
Especially because those softwares have been laying off developers for years and scaling back features. The reason they cost so much now is because existing features are being locked behind separate "services" that you have to pay per person per year.
So an engineering firm with 10 drafters needs to pay $3000/chair/year or $30,000/year just for AutoCAD any additional products incur separate seat fees.
I do, but industry standards usually require proprietary AutoDesk formats and such. Soyou can't really do foss in industrial settings.
Definitely not, which is why it's so ridiculous. You need an insane amount of capital to operate any sort of engineering firm.
This isn't intended for the average user or computer enthusiast. There are people who need this for their professional work and are more interested in using their computer than tinkering with them.
and are more interested in using their computer than tinkering with them.
Shots fired at Linux stans.
I mean, there are probably a few people who either need to travel and can't use a desktop with twice the power, or who are locked into Apple, but honestly I can't imagine choosing this over a Windows box of equal cost even for design work.
I can’t imagine choosing this over a Windows box of equal cost even for design work.
As a software engineer who doesn't hate herself I absolutely can lol
My guess is they buy it with the company's budget and not their own money so it doesn't matter as much. Overall, Apple is still really overpriced for what you get.
In my industry Apple is everywhere. I use them at work, we even have that 5k dollar iMac pro but after 10 years of using apple personally I recently switched back to windows. Only thing I really miss is air drop but I will say the software is a good bit more stable on Mac os. Not so much that I'd pay Apple prices but I Def run into more issues on my new computer than my old MacBook
Windows had their own version of airdrop. They never advertised it, and used the fact that nobody used it as an excuse to get rid of it.
It probably wouldn’t help bc Apple is always on that walled garden shit. Most of my clients have iPhones and it’s slightly easier to just airdrop their files from their phone to our macs than have to deal with email but I manage lol.
I'm gonna assume those various words and numbers mean "this thing computes extremely well" :blob-no-thoughts:
it's actually hard to get a bearing on how powerful this machine really is, believe it or not, 32-core GPU is not a very meaningful blurb to anyone.
And even the cheap M1 chips in the macbook air are dummy fast, as in blow an i7 out of the water in native compilation.
This is designed to be paid with a company charge card. It's not made for end user personal laptops.
When my dipshit company's IT dept decided that I wouldn't be allowed to work on Linux anymore, I played hardball and gave them the specs of a $2700 MacBook Pro to get me to use instead. Refused to budge. I didn't even need all of the shit it had, I just wanted to make the company's wallet hurt.
Some of us need that much computing power to post and have brand loyalty, sweatie
it's expensive because the processor is fast. Earlier macs would come with the same Intel processor you could get cheaper elsewhere but this is their own hardware now
This isn't a gaming computer the only kind of person that would consider this is someone who wold benefit professionally from the extra CPU and GPU cores
Still can't believe how good ARM chips have gotten over the past few years. My android phone has a GPU with the same raw power as an original Xbox one. This apple laptop has around a 9+ teraflop GPU.
It's just mind blowing. The prices are still indefensible though.
You are forgetting about the display. That's a pro video editing display. One of those by itself as a standalone unit goes for the same price as the laptop itself. A standalone display would also be bigger, but still when you consider you are getting a good laptop with it, it's a good deal.
And they put a notch in their really expensive display for no good reason
-
Make really good laptop, great specs and battery life for most users.
-
Price it out of the range of 99% of people, put a notch in the ultra high tech display
Just Apple things™
-
Lmao. I mean, as long as the screen gets taller that isn't a big deal. But I kinda doubt it did.
16:10 is actually standard for laptops and professional displays. So you are losing space to the notch.
Nope. Only the bottom of the barrel, absolutely cheapest crappiest ones are 16:9. 16:9 displays aren't actually wider than the same size 16:10 because of rounding. They are just shorter.
my Acer Helios 300 from a few years ago is 16:9 but maybe that is because it is focused on gaming
Acer Helios 300
focused on gaming
Yeah, that's exactly right. There aren't a lot of high refresh rate displays other than 16:9 and ultrawides.
I don't see how the price is indefensible, the pricing is similar to other professional laptops like the Thinkpad P series. Laptops with an Intel Xeon are like 3k and go up to 5k
The macbook air is 3 times cheaper and does all the same things. This only makes sense to buy if you want to do those things (rending videos, compiling, whatever) faster which would only matter for a professional
Making the laptop hard to repair and upgrade with your own RAM and SSD is bad
At least that Thinkpad laptop has a GPU with 16 GB of memory and 6144 cores, instead of this wimpy integrated GPU.
It is difficult to compare these numbers across different architectures because how a "core" is defined. That Thinkpad laptop is x86, the Apple one is ARM. They are using different instruction sets and architectures
Based on the performance of the M1 chips in the Macbook air, the Apple chips could perform better than their competition.
Well the GPU isn't x86_64 or ARM64, it's just a separate proprietary thing, but yes. Probably not a 1-to-1 on the GPU threads.
I mean the M1 max GPU isn't wimpy by most standards (its got around the same performance as next gen game consoles), but yeah the one in the Lenovo is much more powerful.
wimpy integrated GPU.
the M1 GPU (specifically 16 core and 32 core ones, which don't translate 1:1 with CUDA cores or CPU cores) are actually not wimpy. The are vastly superior to Intel's integrated GPUs.
While it is true that you can buy a laptop with a superior dedicated Nvidia/AMD card, in terms of frames per second, they'll require a fan as loud as a jet engine to cool and still burn your legs, plus your battery life will be 20 minutes gaming.
That ThinkPad is more powerful than most standalone PC's lol. Even on the GPU front, a 27 tflop GPU. Absolutely ridiculous
I just don't see the point of consumer electronics that are so expensive. Yes, they offer amazing performance and features, but almost no one can buy them. I understand their use if you do video editing or something as a job, but damn it's expensive.
The Apple laptop there is like more than half a year of my salary/what I like off in the global south lol. The ThinkPad is even worse
I just don’t see the point of consumer electronics that are so expensive.
They're not really consumer electronics. They don't offer any benefit to a normal consumer compared to a $1000 laptop.
Gaming hardware is much worse. People are buying GPUs for $2000 to play games at a slightly higher FPS
I think those ARM processors are way cheaper for Apple than the Intel ones, tbh
Probably since they are making it themselves instead of buying it from another company.
There's this fantasy in the Apple Fandom that there exist these creative professionals who totally need serious horsepower but crammed in to mobile form factor like a laptop to keep up with their 'on the move' professional lifestyle.
There are two types of people who are going to buy this kind of machine:1.) The aspiring creative professional who buys the machine on their own dime for the hype and to be seen rather than buying a more reasonably priced (cough desktop) workhorse and spending the difference on more tools that actually contribute to their professional output.
2.) Boomer lawyer/executive types that don't give a sweet mary fuck about CPU/GPU performance out or M1 chips, they just have the means/budget and want whatever is top of the line and better than everyone lower in the pecking order in the meeting room. The machine will never be used for the heavy workload it was designed for, in fact, most of the cycles will be used for running Microsoft Office applications (probably on Parallels) while connecting to an inferior external display because it's larger.
most of the cycles will be used for running Microsoft Office
You basically need a machine like that if you want to open a second instance of excel in less than 30 seconds, esp if you have 100 chrome tabs running.
lmao can't wait to see how much this is gonna cost in BRL
oh holy shit, I just checked here and it's R$27k, just about two and a half years' worth of our federal minimum wage, great deal!
This is nothing. Apple used to sell $5000 computers.
In 1985 dollars.
Computers took far more labor to produce under the prevailing social conditions in 1985 than they do now, so they inevitably tended to cost more
Eh, I don't know about that. Computers were a LOT simpler back then. You could make one yourself from parts. Try that today.
And by "from parts" I don't mean buying a video card, motherboard, etc. I mean buying a bag of resistors, capacitors, and a circuit board and wiring and soldering it together yourself.
their new proprietary chips are actually produced by TSMC in Taiwan
wonder how much leverage Apple has in DoD these days
I stupidly hoped that the adoption of ARM first party processors would mean a line of affordable macbooks and I could finally not depend on hackintoshing and shitty work MBPs but lo, i've been made a fool yet again
Eh. I really doubt most people are buying these for themselves. Business expenses.
they'd probably sell fewer devices if they were affordable
Yeah I'm actually excited for the return of MagSafe and ports and the removal of the touchbar. That notch is indefensible tho
guess my decade-old macbook will have to limp along, I waited out the touchbar and I will buy a non-Apple laptop before I deal with that fucking notch
Yeah I've got a 2015 for work and have turned down new machines a few times trying to ride out the touch bar and the butterfly keys
Is there any upside to Apple's garbage whatsoever over similar Windows/PC products?
it's duplo. it's for babies that would choke on anything requiring fine motor skills and would never imagine coloring outside the lines or building something off menu.
the apple product ecosystem is a prison where the inmates celebrate their restrictions as features.
the premium is because apple shit is a fashion accessory more than anything else. it certainly does not go to the workers who build the shit.
now Apple makes their own CPUs and GPUs which perform quite well. For some workloads you would get better performance with Mac hardware and software than in Windows software and Intel/AMD hardware
Better performance because Apple's hardware is better, or because it handles certain tasks better overall? I am a total stranger to Macs so I have no clue where they fit in the IT world.
A bit of both. Overall they have good performance, and they added bits to the processor that make them much faster in certain tasks like machine learning. Basically it's like they took a small section of the overall CPU and dedicated to a specific type of task to boost that performance.
Previously, the latter. Since these new machines though, it’s really a mix. The processors are pretty much tailored to the types of work that macOS does most frequently, in addition to being hella fast outright
Objectively, Apple's M1 laptops are superior to AMD/Intel laptops per watt, fan noise, and burning your lap less.
If you're a hardcore gamer, you can buy laptops with more powerful GPUs, but your battery life will be 20 minutes, your cooling system will be very loud (sometimes even while idling...), and your laptop will burn your legs.
If you're a casual gamer, gaming on OSX is a minefield. Luckily for me, the 2020 M1 macbook air already runs the small number of games I want to play better than my current laptop, so when I get the M1 Max it'll be good enough. You'll need to pick out the dealbreaker games you want to play and research them to see if they have acceptable framerates, require anti-cheat software that operates correctly under OSX, etc..
If you do software development for linux servers (basically all non-C# webdevs), Apple provides a unix environment which is generally suitable for writing your code without giant slow virtual machines, which is an experience that is superior to using windows for the same task. To use a metaphor, unix is 2% different from linux, windows is 95% different from linux.
Also, windows telemetry, nagware, nagupdates, unsetting your settings, built-in malware, forced unwanted restarts, etc., has gotten a million times worse than it was under windows 7. I consider 7 to be the last usable version of windows.
I've never installed linux on a laptop where the headphone jack detection, suspend/hibernate, brightness keys all worked correctly, and could get working after a reasonable amount of tinkering And when you get a lucky 2/3, you still had other random issues where nobody else online has the issue, or the solutions online just don't work, or don't have any answers. There is this weird thing where people seem to think "using linux" means dicking around all day trying to figure out what settings work or installing 400 distros until one of them works, or being a full-on systems engineer just to have a working laptop. Apple gives you a better baseline of guarantees that your operating system is at least half-assedly familiar with that hardware it's running on. Windows has actually surprisingly declined in this regard, and the official/original drivers are typically written for windows first and foremost!
I'm not sure what the statistics are on the music recording and video editing industry are, but it's not rare that those types of people will swear by OSX for that. People who don't want to use OSX probably do fine also.
