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Has Apple lost their mind? March 8th Event Disappointment
- Thread starter NightOne
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The entry-level Macbook Air has stayed at $999 for over 10 years. The 20"-21" iMac at $1199 for 14 years (now 24").
(https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/mac-prices-us-usa-united-states-america.html)
Base iPhone prices have continued to go up and up and up.
After inflation, the Mac has never been as accessible to as wide a base of customers than now and delivered more value for that money.
Yep! I did an inflation-adjusted plot a while back of all Mac SKUs since 1984, using the priceR R package to convert the prices to 2020 dollars. The only category that’s gone up in price in the past two decades has been workstations, where it costs a lot more to differentiate themselves from increasingly capable consumer Macs than it used to. If you consider the Mac Studio a “workstation” in the same vein as an iMac Pro (I think at least the Ultra version counts), it’s one of the cheapest workstations Apple’s released in a long time:
Apple stock price dropped some points after the announcements. Seems that a lot of people agree with you. It has been on a straight down-hill run since March 9th.
What stockholders are seeing is a new computer that VERY few people will buy and zero new innovation in the other product lines. Just predictable incremental stuff.
The WORSE part of Apple'a line is their Mac software. Nothing new in the last 12+ years. I'm not kidding. Development is dead. Lok at Pages, Keynote, Garage Band and Final Cut Pro and Logic. Any new thinking there?
Actually all three categories you listed are on an upwards trajectory. This has come after a long downwards trend though.
I'd really like to see something like this done but split up into the following 3 categories
Consumer / prosumer / professional and workstation
I say this because the consumer market and prosumer markets can vary quite wildly in terms of price fluctuations.
Stock dropping in the short term after an Apple event is not an indication that the keynote was a failure. If the drops do not rectify themselves in 12 to 24 months then we can say things are looking bad.
A lot of people sell after a good keynote, thinking this is as high as Apple will get for a while (ie Apple riding the wave after the keynote). This selling puts more stock on there market to sell (which obviously need buyers) but also lowers the stock price.
I would say the day traders got out and it is taking a little longer than usual to rectify everything back to normal.
We need to remember people do not sell just because the price dropped. People sell mainly for two reasons.
1. When the investors feel the price has hit a peak and will drop soon. Getting out on a high.
2. To mitigate losses and sell now before things get even worse.
I feel after most events point 1 is what happens.
Yes and yes.
In two or three generation, you mean M3 Ultra or M4 Ultra will be inside the MacBook Pro?
The M1 Max works without problems when running 10 cpu cores and 32 gpu cores in the same time.
= When running M1 Ultra and 20 cpu cores inside the MacBook Pro there should be also no problems.
Apple can use the 16-inch case for the M1 Ultra / M2 Ultra and later it will be possible to use also 18-inch and 20-inch.
Apple can change the case to improve the airflow cooling like the mac pro or the 6k monitor.
Apple can use obviously a better heat spreader.
Apple can use professional heat pipes.
Apple can also improve the airflow cooler.
Apple can use a much better cooling paste.
Apple can use cooling pads too.
For example the macbook air with only bad cooling pads improves the performance by 20%.
I wouldn't read too much into the trends right at the end: for laptops, you can see the increase in average from 2019-present is driven by new product categories at the top end (the addition of the 16" i9 MBP and the later M1 Max models), with the base MacBook Air prices being the same as they were in ~2015 after adjusting for inflation.
The desktop trends from 2020 to date are also distorted a bit by the lack of multiple Mac mini SKUs: beforehand, there's an individual data point for each CPU configuration offered in the mini, whereas now there's only a single data point for the M1 Mini and its single CPU config. Without those multiple Mini models lowering the average it makes the average cost looks like it's increased.
As for a consumer / prosumer / professional plot, I can give it a shot but I'd need the rules you'd use to sort Macs into those categories: what differentiates "consumer" from "prosumer", and "prosumer" from "professional"? Do all MBPs fall into a certain category, or are some "prosumer" while others are "professional"? As long as you give me some basic sorting rules I can apply them to the data and see what it looks like.
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I both agree and disagree with your comment. It's just somewhat odd that even you fail to see that there's a problem. You see, I don't buy a Mac for their hardware - I buy it for their software. Always has.
I'm not going to build a hackintosh in the future. I am however going to invest in a modern cpu architecture like Apple Silicon over Intel unless there's a darn good deal on a more current Intel iMac than my current one - of which I've seen a few.
If money could grow on trees then I most certainly would have bought all the things that Apple makes and have made through out the last 5 to 10 years.
I'm not debating the fact that more people have more money than I probably have. I'm saying that ... I don't know what I'm saying. You're right. You are all right.
I know there's great resell value in an iMac - my iMac cost me around 15.000 Danske kroner. Now I can hand it over to Apple for a measly 1800 Danske kroner (look it up yourself for a conversion). After only ~7 years of me buying a brand new Intel iMac.
D'uh. I'm out.
You should apply for an engineering job at Apple as you clearly know more than they do, just squeeze in a chip with double the die space of the m1 max. 😏
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In this comparison is there a reason the LG is a niche product, and so needs to be $1300, but the higher specced Mac Studio display is deemed mass market and so can be $1000 or less?
The post I quoted quoted a post about wanting the M1 Ultra in a MacBook Pro. That’s the only reason I mentioned laptops. I’d assume that these laptop workstations are still throttled vs the same chip in a desktop (or at least, seriously thermally constrained).
You get a mass market product by making something widely useful in sufficient quantities. LG didn't want to make the Ultrafine particularly attractive. The monitor is still basically the same as in 2016, it doesn't have the HDMI / DisplayPort inputs all their other USB-C monitors have, and the only output ports are USB-C. Apple could have chosen otherwise with the Studio Display, but they also made a niche product that doesn't even work particularly well with non-Apple hardware.
Given the heatsink in the Studio, I'm not sure the Ultra will ever be in something as small as a 16" MBP. It really is a desktop class chip, even if it carries it's own GPU. In fact, the proximity of the GPU, RAM, and CPU is probably why it will be too hard to cool for a laptop. Just guessing btw, no need to get huffy about it people.
So you were being inconsistent. If being a niche product is an excuse for the Ultrafine's price, it works as an excuse for the Studio Display too.
The Ultrafine line literally was the previous generation of Apple proprietary display. It's pretty well known that when Apple management decided they wanted to stop selling Apple branded monitors, they handed off the electronics and firmware for next gen 4K and 5K Thunderbolt Displays to LG. They let LG do the industrial design, retail packaging, and support, and in return carried the displays in Apple Stores as the official Apple approved monitor for use with Macs.
That's why LG Ultrafines work exactly the way you'd expect an Apple monitor to work, right down to not bothering with controls or OSD on the monitor. You're supposed to use the brightness keys on an Apple keyboard and the Displays control panel in macOS to configure everything.
But there is an alternative! It's complaining about other people complaining.
* Oops! Actually snark about other people complaining. That's the real alternative.
Tech stocks in general are in a Bear market.
The price has almost nothing to do with the recent announcements.
I personally expect Apple to drop in price even more before the end of the year.
Not going into PRSI stuff, but some news headlines from Mar 8:
- Ukraine war news from March 8: US and UK announce bans on Russian oil, McDonald’s leads latest corporate exodus from Russia
- Investors dump European ETFs for commodities funds
- Shell to stop buying Russian oil and gas
- US warns banks to be on high alert for Russia sanctions evasion
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I agree to an extent, other than GarageBand and Logic have been upgraded a lot over the last ten years. Sure the last huge revamp was when 'Logic Pro X' and 'GB X' were launched in 2013, but so much has been added since, especially to Logic, that it's kinda underselling the product that they still call it Logic V10. What Apple class as a dot-change would be any other manufacturer's major revision. What IMO holds Apple back from being truly revolutionary is this workspace is consumers' reluctance to pay for upgrades to the apps they've already bought. Everybody wants to pay their two hundred dollars for Logic and three hundred for FCP and have it upgraded free for life. So who's paying the dev's? From that perspective you can see why the likes of Adobe and Avid instead use a perpetual-licencing model (or a 'rent-an-app' model, as I call it) to keep the cash coming in to develop new features, from people other than new customers.
Bro stockholders are responding to extreme global instability lol it's got next to nothing to do with Apple
Also they completely overhauled logic in 2019