Sounds so familiar to my case: bought a refurbished, good as new (1 charge cycle!), 1TB/16 14” M1pro for slightly less than a 512/8 15 mba would cost.Look up the pricing of “low cost” Chromebook. Do you really think Apple is going to compete with that kind of pricing?
Else, if pinched-budget school is weighing 3-5 Chromebooks vs. 1 “low cost” MB, which do you think will get the order? There’s always a LOT of students to equip. Extrapolate 3-5 to 1 to 300 or 3,000 students and the dollar differences really show.
Want to sell more MBs? Get much more competitive on RAM & SSD. I was literally credit card in hand ready to buy that beautiful, new 15” Air but wanted more than minimum specs. Add some RAM, add some SSD and it’s suddenly at MBpro pricing.
Meanwhile, I also wanted a true PC for old fashioned Bootcamp and was able to buy a fairly loaded gaming PC with 10TB of fast SSD and 32GB of RAM for LESS than Apple charges for only the 8TB SSD upgrade in Macs. One can buy an 8TB stick of fast m.2 at retail for about 1/3rd of that upgrade price right now. Too bad we’re all proprietaried out of even an option of installing it.
Desirable configs are too expensive… by pricing the sole supply of RAM & SSD at many times market rates. That’s great for shareholders if everyone just pays up… but it gave this near-Apple-everything consumer a full stop on buying a spectacular new MB a few months ago.
Maybe it’s time to find a better balance between maximizing shareholder ROI and maximizing consumer value? As is IMO, it feels like it’s 10 for shareholders and 1 for consumers. Yes, pursuit of profit is crucial in every business, but it’s important to not lose sight of the source of those profits. Accumulated goodwill and halo effect has its limits.
“Let them eat cake?” 💰💰💰
Ssd and ram upgrades are way overpriced: just the upgrade to 1 TB (ie +0.75TB) is more expensive than a PS5 that contains a 0.83TB SSD (and is even faster). Oh and it can play games and includes a controller and all that. And I have seen people in the forums here defending Apple over this…If all weather tyres usually cost 400 dollars to install, but car manufacturer Y charges 1600-2000 dollars for the same tyres (and you have to go via Y to get those), isn’t that a ripoff as well?
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