| ▲ | 2001zhaozhao 4 hours ago |
| I think Apple's cost efficiency advantages are really compounding now and it'll get increasingly hard for competitors to catch up. Everything they put in the product is either in-house or benefit from their scale and negotiating power. In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience. |
|
| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc. |
| |
| ▲ | frollogaston 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | They make passively cooled Windows laptops too, but doing that with Intel or AMD means having something very slow. | |
| ▲ | philistine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are so right, and I blame some of the thinking on this very website. People are adamant that they need to upgrade the RAM, change the storage, and replace the battery on their laptops. Adamant. All that means that you need a separate memory controller, a separate this and that. It adds up, and PC makers are forced to put in a fan. On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU? Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that! | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick. It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want. However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device). | |
| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Counterpoint: storage and ports should be upgradable. Ram and CPU both last forever, but drives die and ports wear out. |
| |
| ▲ | mywittyname an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think they understand, but they are also building machines that need to run Windows + pre-installed bloatware without being so obviously bogged down no the sales floor that no one buys them. | |
| ▲ | trvz an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They did a smaller one with an Intel CPU in the 2015 Macbook. There’s just no good low power x86 CPU. |
|
|
| ▲ | SonOfKyuss 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It will be interesting to see what happens. Other large laptop makers such Dell have some of the same scale advantages (minus in-house silicon) and might be more willing to sacrifice on profit margin. |
| |
| ▲ | Jyaif 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Dell is screwed by the software and never made the investment in a good touchpad. | | |
| ▲ | rationalist 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The touchpad on the new XPS 14 seems to be extremely good. (Although a lot of their XPSes are shipping defective.) |
|
|
|
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Chromebooks exist at a lower price point with even less RAM. |
| |
