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Are we witnessing an "active" negative marketing campaign?
- Thread starter Droid13
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On the chassis, against my leg. I'm not obsessive enough to open it up or install software that'll monitor interior temperature.
At the end that's what matters to people. My Intel macbook I could not even browse the Web on my lap.
I haven’t noticed no heat what so ever yet. Nor am I doing 1,245 benchmark tests a day on it. I’m just enjoying my air m2 as it was meant to be.
My advice: ignore it. It's always happened and always will. The reason you can tell that PC users/reviewers are nervous about Apple Silicon is because they're spending so much time picking it apart and whining about it. The products will continue speaking for themselves, and hopefully Apple continues keeping their heads down and building on this great start.
Both matter to people. While you don't see the stats live, several users do have them enabled and do see and take them into account.
Yet there are $1,800 Dell laptops that have 8GB RAM and 256 SSD.
A small amount of users in the MacRumors echo chamber? Maybe. People in the real world? I don't think so. People buy their MacBook Airs, and get on with their lives and work. They don't spend all day obsessing over their laptop's SoC temperature lol.
Yes it also seems to me most of the Windows stuff competing at the M2 price range is 16/256. And at $1800 it's at least 16/512.
To be honest I think Macs are no longer more expensive than Windows machines for what you're getting. All of the reviews I've seen comparing the M2 Air to similarly compact and light Windows machines show that the Air is actually far better value in most situations. Can't believe how the turns have tabled over the last 5 or so years.
Yeah I'm gonna call BS on that. Just went through Dell's website and that's not true. Looked at about 20 laptops, and none were 8/256. At $1800 most were 16/512, with a couple 16/1tb. Maybe there's one somewhere, but otherwise you can't use that stat to argue against what the other person said.
Check what you say before pulling stuff randomly out of your trumpet.
If by "people," you mean a small sliver of the enthusiast market, then sure. Those are the people who need (or have convinced themselves that they need) a Pro machine with a fan.
I imagine that the vast bulk of the general public, as well as most enthusiasts who fully understand their needs and have opted for the Air, are not concerned about heat. As long as it doesn't singe their laps (as did my mid-2009 MBP) and doesn't slow down markedly in the course of their usual workflow, they could not care less.
10 seconds. There are some more. Your last sentence was uncalled for. I know exactly what I’m saying.
Latitude 5431 Laptop | Dell USA
Shop the Dell Latitude 5431 Business Laptop featuring a faster processor, 14 inch screen, memory and Intelligent Privacy, or view all Latitude laptops at Dell.com.
www.dell.com
You are then playing possum as there is a reason why apps like iStat are popular. It means that more than your fair share of average users use them. Otherwise, those apps wouldn’t be in business.
How many use those apps, vs. how many overall users?
A piece of software doesn't necessarily have to be in wide use to be profitable. On my work machine, I have a very specialized piece of commercial software, geared entirely to my sector of my industry. There are probably no more than 10,000 people in the entire world who would have any use for it at all, and I bet no more than 2/3 of us actually have it. That doesn't stop the company who developed it from selling it very profitably or updating it on a regular basis.
10 seconds. There are some more. Your last sentence was uncalled for. I know exactly what I’m saying.
Latitude 5431 Laptop | Dell USA
Shop the Dell Latitude 5431 Business Laptop featuring a faster processor, 14 inch screen, memory and Intelligent Privacy, or view all Latitude laptops at Dell.com.www.dell.com
Are you having a laugh?
That's from their Latitude business line. If you don't understand why that's not comparable to a consumer laptop then I don't think you know exactly what you're saying.
As I said, all the Dell CONSUMER laptops at $1800 were at least 16/512.
What you're doing is like saying that the Air SSD/RAM upgrade prices are OK because oh look here's a Panasonic Toughbook CF33 that's nearly $4000 with only 256/8, and I'll just completely ignore the fact that it's obviously expensive because of other things. Granted, that is a more extreme example, but it's essentially the same problem when you're using a Dell Latitude laptop as justification.
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What is special about this particular Latitude that makes it a "business" and not a "consumer" machine?
What do these terms even mean when discussing raw specifications? If a working professional uses an MBA does that make it a business machine or a consumer machine?
My view: these are all purely marketing terms and serve only as a distraction.
From what I can see this particular Latitude is made of plastic (presumably to keep the weight down), has a relatively low resolution display and is not fitted with mobile broadband (which could have been a reason for the price). You can drop the support options away from "on-site" to "mail-in" and still have the thing priced at this level. Interestingly if you add anything to it - such as a camera or bump up the display - it forces you to take on extra RAM and SSD.
If we are going to throw this machine out of the mix, there are better ways of doing so (for instance, this doesn't appear to be a machine that is built around the idea of being as thin and light as possible).
As an aside, ToughBooks are special because they are built to tolerate extreme "in the field" conditions. This line from Panasonic occupies a niche that few others compete in. I would not consider them comparable to most other machines, never mind any Apple offering.
EDIT: An M2-equivalent chip in a ToughBook would be quite awesome for those that need the horsepower and absolutely require the toughness. Won't happen soon though.
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It's the Vpro CPU
Apple will never do a mac ToughBook. Apple, follows the money and currently it's the cat video people on Youtube and Insta-hoes, otherwise known as "Content Creators" 🤣
Option for a vPro CPU.
Apple will never do a mac ToughBook. Apple, follows the money and currently it's the cat video people on Youtube and Insta-hoes, otherwise known as "Content Creators" 🤣
That could be a valid way of separating it out.
The machine I am looking at (have been playing with the options) does not have a vPro processor. When I add it in, it forces an increase in the RAM to 16GB (SSD stays at 256GB) and there is a price jump to just over $1,900.
I agree, Apple will not be in the business of licensing their chip to others or of building their own tough machine.
‘my personal favorite is the Site that bashes the machime, it looks dirty, it runs hot, burns your lap, slows down to a crawl after five minutes. But we’re giving one away to some lucky visitor.
Do you feel lucky punk, well do ya.
Well your basically proving my point.
The constant complaints is “at X price it should not come with 8/256”. Yet you just showed a $4,000 system with those specs. The Air has a lot of better things compared to similar prices consumer products. M2 is much better than the low end i5 s that are included, the screen is typically better, better build quality and believe it or not but I have no issues paying more for macos over Windows.
Now if you don’t care if you are getting a 1080p screen, crappy trackpad, hot i5, and more well that’s your choice. But to put a price on two parts of what make a computer and ignore the other dozen things is ridiculous.
So let’s just stop saying “a 1,100+ device should have more than 8/256”. But a $4,000 is fine since it has other advantages? Well what about the other advantages of the Air? We just ignore those since it’s Apple and we want the clicks?
And personally, I don’t care about the other advantages on the $4,000 system. I do think it’s absolutely ridiculous to have a $4,000 system with 8/256. But others will find the differences worth it.
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Probably the business price is bumped up by 30% so that any business that opens an account can get a "special 25% discount for our most important customers". Businesses buying laptops by the dozen will send out for multiple tenders. Corporate clients buying hundreds of laptops will be negotiating supply & support contracts. Employees of larger organisations ordering one-off machines for work will often be required to buy from an approved range.
If you're not worried about individual sales of a product, publishing a competitive price just tells competitors what they need to offer to undercut you.
Then there's the possibility that a particular model has been certified by some industry or government body - cha-ching! - or is just the de-facto standard (*cough* ThinkBook *cough*). To be fair, Apple partly gets away with its pricing because manny Mac users would simply never contemplate getting a PC.
The M1 Air was a huge step forward and re-wrote the book on what you could do with an ultra-thin laptop with decent battery life. I think it's fair to say that it exceeded expectations.
Trouble is, it means that Apple have already cashed in the big gains from moving from Intel to Apple Silicon, the M2 is moving from Apple Silicon 1.0 to Apple Silicon 1.1 and only offers modest gains. Then you've got a situation with shortages and inflation (coupled with the markets expecting the pandemic boom in tech profits to keep booming forever) that means a price rise was almost inevitable.
All in all, M2 is "that difficult second album" so people are pre-disposed to be negative about it - at which point you get a huge audience for tearing it to pieces.
That's not letting Apple off the hook for every criticism of the new M2 machines.
There's no excuse for introducing a SSD bottleneck which - even if it's not a deal breaker for everybody - is a clear downgrade from the previous model and appears to be simply a wheeze to charge a premium for the 512GB upgrade.
I can't get worked up about the thermal throttling though - any fanless system is going to do that, and it still appears to be faster than the M1 Air. Still, it's a disappointment that we still need the M2 13" MacBook Pro - who's only distinction now seems to be that it has a fan - my money would have been on that being obsoleted by the M2 Air. Looks like that will have to wait for 3nm.
Keeping the old model around as the entry-level was probably necessary (Apple needed to be sure to have a MBA available in quantity for the Back to School season) but is a bad look - and puts pressure on the M2 MBA to justify itself as some sort of "MacBook Air Pro" that should be able to tackle bigger jobs - when really it's just this year's model of the M1 Air.
Just because you aren't interested in the what a business laptop or rugged laptop has to offer doesn't make those laptops not worth it. The difference between a consumer laptop (mac or PC) and a business/rugged laptops is much greater than the difference between a consumer Apple laptop and a consumer Windows laptop.
Your claim was...
Where the only example you could find was a business laptop that has functions that no consumer laptop has. And now you're seemingly equating the difference between a M2 Air and a Windows laptop with the difference between a consumer laptop and a $4000 rugged laptop just because you don't need the functionality of a rugged laptop!
A $4000 rugged laptop with water resistance, drop protection, a 1500nit touch screen, track pad that can be used with gloves etc. etc. is not comparable!
If you want to make a REASONABLE argument here, stick to consumer laptops.
But...
You can get a lot more for the price of an M2 Air than you alluding to there. For example, for $200 less than a base M2 Air you can get a HP Pavillion Plus 14" from their website with
i7-12700H
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
2.8K OLED
Or for the same price as a base spec M2 Air, an ASUS Vivobook Pro 14" with:
Ryzen 7 5800H
RTX 3050 dedicated graphics
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
2.8K OLED
Now make your argument that it's justifiable for the $1200 M2 Air to only have 8/256GB in comparison to these CONSUMER laptops, not some Dell Latitude or Panasonic ToughBook! This notion of fair assessment is not hard to grasp!
Personally, I don't disagree with you; for me it's OK for the M2 Air to only have 256/8GB at $1200 because I value macOS, build quality, smallness, and battery life above everything else. But, I can see exactly how for some people 256/8GB is inexcusable at this price point. However, you've gone about trying to justify your argument in a slightly strange way using the wrong laptops as comparisons and underestimating what you can get in the Windows laptop market.