Hard to get excited about a product that became outdated in just 2 months due to the iPad being refreshed with a newer chip...
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Best Buy and Amazon Introduce Steep Discounts on M2 and M3 MacBook Air [Updated]
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Such a great point
Surely Apple must realize what happens to perception on their products when they dunk on them all with an M4 in the iPad all the sudden
They gotta get it together and be more synced up than this
Even a non educated buyer is going to be like ... "but this has an M2/M3 and the M4 is already out?"
I get why they stagger releases, but it's getting VERY messy now...
I think Apple would like it very much if Air buyers became iPad buyers so that all software purchases go through the App Store. Anyone who wants an M4 MB will twist in the wind for a while to give them time to consider the iPad.
I have a cousin who's just barely tech literate, as needed for her work, and she tried going all in on an iPad
It worked for a year for her but she eventually got frustrated trying to do PDF related things on it and got a 15" M2 MBA last Fall
Happy as a clam now
IMO M1 or M2 with plenty of RAM is the sweet spot unless one gets into apps that need ray tracing or heavily use AI, in which case M4 will be worth waiting for. RAM will be important for AI as well as for any heavy processing.
Sure Apple would like MBA buyers to buy iPad Pros instead, but Apple would need to make iPad OS hella more functional first. The value of the MBA is that it allows full [superb IMO] Mac OS functionality.
The point is that RAM under Apple's Unified Memory Architecture is part and parcel of neural engine operation. The NP does not obviate RAM, it utilizes RAM.
Just got my daughter an M3 MacBook Air 15 inch. Upgraded from a 2015 MacBook Air that she got as a graduation gift out of high school. That old MacBook Air lasted from 2015 til 2024 before upgrading her with the M3 MacBook Air 15 inch. She's pleased with it and is blown away how much the macOS has evolved since 2015. I just upgraded to MacBook Pro M3 Pro 16 inch upgrading from a 2015 MacBook Pro.
Apple is not involved in these discounts. There is a significant retail margin that retailers slap on top and they can offer what looks like solid discounts and still make a profit. At least the big ones like Best Buy and Amazon mentioned here can as they sell a lot of them.
Apple isn't discounting anything, or have you ever seen a sale in any Apple Store? And they sell their devices to retailers at fixed prices, so they really aren't involved with retailer discounts.
You can imagine how much profit Apple makes on every device sold through the Apple Store, they get to keep their share and the retailer share is theirs as well. At last on the very high-end like a maxed out MBP they make a profit in the 4 digits for every single unit sold in their own store. And that's still before considering that these expensive memory and storage upgrade parts cost them much less to manufacture in the first place. Like upgrading from 1TB to 2TB costs $400 just for the additional 1TB. Even if Apple used the best chips for such a device that 1TB would cost them less than 50% of what they charge us for it.
The NE is designed to primarily run lightweight AI processes that service the OS very fast. As inference becomes increasingly bandwidth constrained w/ larger models, anything memory intensive should go to the GPU otherwise it would be a waste. Yes it uses the unified memory pool but likely not more than 2 gigs or so in total. A larger RAM allocation won't factor.
This is why having a ton of RAM in these machines for inference purposes after a certain point is a bit of a waste, at least given the current SOTA in LLM arch, outside of say MOE applications. An M3 Max w/ 128gb running a model taking up most of that RAM will spit out like 2-3 tok/sec, which IMO is a terrible UX w/ pretty limited use cases. It's also why an M3 Max and an M1 Max perform roughly the same with these larger models and an M3 Pro is slower than an M2 Pro.
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What % of their sales are direct from Apple? (I don’t have the answer but I don’t think it’s going to be big. Almost everyone I know buys from 3rd party, typically Costco, since they offer a great warranty).
Second, Apple matches discounts at other retailers up to 10%.
They’ve done it in the past…
And the M4 chip is definitely going to be discussed, likely to show off its neural engine and AI features, and I bet the M4 Pro/Max/Ultra/Extreme/Whatever lines make an appearance.
It makes no sense for them to announce the M4 the way they did unless they plan to make a big deal about it at WWDC.
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
My M2 MBA 13" is the best Mac I have EVER owned.
I don't use it for work (got a PC for that) ergo high-performance isn't a requirement, so I just don't see replacing it for the foreseeable future.
It does everything I need to with RIGHT NOW immediacy.
Combined with my M1 iPad Pro 12.9" I am SET for Apple devices for another 5 years, AT LEAST.
I don't use it for work (got a PC for that) ergo high-performance isn't a requirement, so I just don't see replacing it for the foreseeable future.
It does everything I need to with RIGHT NOW immediacy.
Combined with my M1 iPad Pro 12.9" I am SET for Apple devices for another 5 years, AT LEAST.
Fair enough, I was not aware of that, I did once walk into the Apple Store mildy upset (mostly annoyed) about an older failing device and once the store manager got involved he offered me a 15% discount pretty much immediately if I buy a new Mac right there in the store which I ended up doing as the discount for the upgraded model I chose came out to a significant sum. I didn't plan to and was just going to use the desktop computer but the price was so good I ended up selling that as soon as M1 was released and lost like 50 bucks from the sale so that was a good impulse decision.
10% is also what their education store offers on Macs. So that's really nothing to them if a "lowly" store manager can approve 15% discounts. (With lowly I mean that a store manager still ranks at the very bottom of Apple's structure when it comes to deciding prices.)
Store managers can do a lot. In the past, they approved me getting a top of the line laptop (max'ed out with touch bar in the day) in exchange for my low end one (16/512 no touch bar) that came back repaired incorrectly (it came back with the lid making a clicking sound). That would be way more than 15%.
The "steep discount" Best Buy price for an M3 MBA, 16GB/512GB, is $1,599 - exactly the same as the education price at the Apple Store. So, if you or one of your family members is a student, teacher, or administrator at nearly any school from kindergarten up, you might want to check that option out.