It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.

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hylaride 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.

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vovavili 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Would be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.

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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market.

Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.

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seanmcdirmid an hour ago | parent [-]

Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

	▲	robertjpayne 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
	▲	bigyabai 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box. > They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that. Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.

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varispeed 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chromebook should be classified as torture device.

	▲	actionfromafar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Enhanced interrogation computing device. We just need your personal data!

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microtonal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.

Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).

Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.

Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]

An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.

[1] https://www.iculture.nl/nieuws/iphone-3g-als-los-toestel-87-...

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40four 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)

	▲	philistine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The white plastic Mac laptop, depending on the generation, was either called the iBook, or later the Macbook when they moved to Intel. Blame it on IBM who didn't want Apple to use PowerBook for a Mac with an Intel chip, which forced the company to rename the whole line.

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sva_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.

	▲	m463 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is a tried and true long-game. Microsoft did this with educational versions of office/etc

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866-RON-0-FEZ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.

This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".

	▲	reaperducer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips". You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right? You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.

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m463 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Costco sells an ipad for $299 (and many memberships refund some of this price)

EDIT: also on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZ75TN5F/

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saltyoldman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)

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asdff 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.

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cls59 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If Apple keeps using A Pro-series chips for the Neo, then the RAM will go to at least 12GB when they swap to the A19 Pro, or newer.

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riffraff 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright

but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?

	▲	asdff 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Certainly but I'd guess the problem won't manifest for years and other showstopping pieces might fail before then. That old frankenstein macbook of mine had the same 850 evo ssd I shoved in it for like 8 years of use and abuse, always high temps with that macbook too. People say you shouldn't use an ssd like that but oh well, it seems to work alright.
	▲	GeekyBear an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There wouldn't be so many people who see no need to upgrade their M1 series computers if this were a real concern.

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varispeed 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Friend of mine has 32GB laptop with top spec last gen Intel 9 and it barely handles larger Word documents and Teams calls.

The fan is just obnoxious on top of that.

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asdff 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is just no way it is actually barely handling them. My 2012 with the dual core handles that. Fans turning on doesn't mean it barely handles it. That is just how those intel macs were. They were like that on day 1 in 2012. Spotlight indexing could be enough to spin the fans. Still does the job though even if its hot and noisy.

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rationalist 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Top-spec computers will always shit the bed when they aren't taken care of properly (bloatware, blocked airflow, etc)

	▲	asdff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Even for the arm series macs the max cpus run way hotter and spin fans sooner than base model in general tasks. Just how those chips are designed. They aren't designed to throttle to keep temps down, they are designed to give you all the horsepower knowing you don't care about noise and heat and care about performance.

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lowbloodsugar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>a decade ago

It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.

	▲	regularfry 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Is it? I had it pegged as pretty much neck-and-neck with the 8GB M1 Macbook Pro that work gave me.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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nikcub 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

and an iPhone 17e for $599

	▲	m463 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		well, also apple has been inflating the price for phones since forever. the iphone launched at $499 EDIT: hmm.. I guess iphone 1 was $499 or $599 and that required a 2-year AT&T contract. Don't know what the actual price was. I do know the top iphone 17 pro max is $1,999. but it does have 2tb of storage, which is amazing in a different way.