Well, the Apple Education Store page reads:
Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers of all grade levels.
So, officially: No, not open to everyone.
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M1 Mac prices will drop by $100-200 when M2 Macs comes out by Nov 2021
- Thread starter Hexley
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Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers of all grade levels.
So, officially: No, not open to everyone.
You are right, I was just replying directly to the statement that it is technically correct that anyone can use it (though they shouldn't unless qualified)
I have tried to use it before and was asked at the store to confirm. My son is a student and we used his student ID to confirm before.
If you do it in store, yes. Over the phone, yes. Online, no.
(And I am a student - I was not asked for proof of enrollment online and have used it many times).
...because the M1 chip has to work in the fanless ultralight MacBook Air (which is likely Apple's biggest volume seller) while the "M2" (or whatever) chip doesn't, but instead has to deliver higher performance in order to convincingly beat the i9s and discrete GPUs in the 16" MBP and iMac (probably by having more CPU and GPU cores).
Of course, it is feasible that an M2 chip with some of its CPU and GPU cores disabled could replace the M1 in the Air. That's standard operating practice in the chip industry - just like 'binning' chips by the highest click speed they'd been tested at. But that's irrelevant to arguments about price points. Only Apple knows whether it would be either possible or cheaper (for them) to keep making M1s or use knobbled M2s, and even that probably wouldn't affect the price point of Macs. A knobbled M2 is not the same value as a full M2, even if it shares the same physical die.
That's the job of an M2X, not M2. And I highly doubt that Intel will be able to catchup to the M1 within the next 2 years.
I see the 14" MBP as the replacement for the more powerful version of 13" MBP with the 10th gen Intel processor we have today. Like the 10th gen Intel 13" MBP the 14" will have 4 USB-C ports. They will for now leave the current 2 port M1 13" in place at a lower price point.
So the lineup for 13/14 Apple Silicon MBPs will be 13" MBP (2 USBC ports, M1 SOC, 16 GB Max memory) and 14" MPB (4 USBC ports M1xx SOC, better display).
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Apple isn't known for reducing prices significantly on older products... they just stop selling the older products. What resellers (eBay and the like) do is a matter of supply versus demand.
Considering the new M1 Macs are the defacto slowest M1 Macs in the world... it's no surprise that when the next iteration comes out, they will be decidedly less popular than they are now. You know, marketing euphoria and all.
Considering the new M1 Macs are the defacto slowest M1 Macs in the world... it's no surprise that when the next iteration comes out, they will be decidedly less popular than they are now. You know, marketing euphoria and all.
Only if you're selling cans of cola in free competition with other people selling near-identical cans of cola to a market in which customers will buy their cola from the cheapest source. Heck, that's simplistic even for cola, or Coke would have worked out years ago that they just have to charge 2 cents less than Pepsi...
Perhaps someone from Pepsi should run Apple. That should go well!
Sometimes, the best strategy is to sell "Luxury asbestos-free Cola made with genuine hand-picked Brazilian sugar cane and 100% organic phosphoric acid" at 50% over the odds and leave it to WallMart to sell the 30 cent cans of own-brand cola as a loss-leader to generate footfall.
Meanwhile, the computer industry has this awkward little wrinkle whereby customers have invested a lot of time, effort and money learning to use their current platform, buying & learning the software that runs on it and so are very, very reluctant to change. You need more than a $200 price difference to overcome that.
Sure. It's not like they spend millions a year on market research to find out who bought MacBook Airs, what the maximum was that they were prepared to pay for one, and what proportion would stump up for RAM and SSD upgrades* and design their machines around the strategically chosen price points... because that would be a silly way of running a large business. Nah, they just tot up the manufacturing costs, whack on their standard x% markup... and it just so happened to come in at exactly 1 cent below the magic psychological $1000 dollar level.
(* which, curiously, cost exactly the same on most Apple models, irrespective of whether they consist of an extra pair of DDR4 sticks popped into empty sockets, LPDDR chips soldered to the mainboard or a whole different M1 SoC package with integrated RAM...)
Yeah... I've got this bridge in Manhatten that you might want to buy. Curiously, it costs exactly as much as that lottery win that you just mentioned on Twitter....
No they haven't. Compared to their predecessors, the new Air and "2 port" (clue!) 13" MBP have the same number of ports (2 - but possibly each with its own TB3 controller which is an upgrade) exactly the same RAM and SSD options (8 or 16 GB RAM, 256-2TB SSD) and swings-and-roundabouts external display support (higher res, no dual display). The only real change in "number of configurations" is two CPU configurations instead of 3. This "fewer ports/not enough RAM" thing is only coming because the M1 performance is attracting users who would not previously have considered the Air/2-port MBP.
...and, yet again, apparently Apple totted up the BOM, added their standard markup and it just so happened to come to exactly the same as the Intel Air/2-Port MBP. Seriously, folks, although the BOM is obviously a factor, these retail prices are strategic choices by Apple. In capitalism, you charge as much as the market will bear.
(The M1 Mini may have a lower price, but it has substantially fewer ports, less RAM capacity, worse external display support than the Intel Mini - it couldn't sustain the same price).
Apple isn't in "the PC market" - which includes huge swathes of corporate sales (which are mainly about supply/leasing/support contracts where retail prices of individual systems are barely relevant) and bargain-bucket sub-$500 systems where the seller only makes a profit if they manage to sell you finance, a rip-off extended warranty and a $100 high-fidelity printer cable.
It's pretty clear from Apple's past behaviour that they're only interested in the premium laptop/all-in-one segment of the market, a segment that they pretty much created. Their competition is not the cheap PC, or the boring corporate unit, but the premium Surface Book/Laptop, the Dell XPS, Asus Zenbook, Razer Blade, with which the Intel Macs were reasonably competitive. If anything, those PCs ranges were created to compete with the Mac rather than vice-versa, and cash in on the premium laptop market that Apple had pioneered. The M1 Macs blow those out of the water on price/performance - they don't need to be cheaper.
Of course, Apple have one other huge competitor: themselves. Cheap, small, long-battery-life Macs compete with the iPad (which Apple are trying to position as a serious laptop alternative). Cheap powerful Macs compete with the higher-end Pro Macs - look at all the people on this forum contemplating trading in their 16" MBPs for 13" M1s at half the price or less. Currently, the M1 Macs are, if anything, underpriced: The #1 job for the "M2" (or whatever) will be to sustain the premium price points of the higher-end models.
Apple have a history - both with the Mac and the iPhone - of focussing on the premium end of the market and letting the mass market do its thing. Probably because history has proven time and time again that it is very, very hard to wean people off PCs, and the main effect of cutting $200 off the price of a Mac is to make $200 less on each Mac you sell.
Prime example was the Mac clones in the 1990s - theory: license MacOS to OEMs and they'll make cheap commodity Mac clones, grow the Mac's market share, we'll clean up on licensing and sell high end Mac Workstations. Practice: the clones undercut the high-end Macs and just poached existing customers from Apple. (To be fair, the theory may have been a bit more "help! we need a few million by next quarter to stay solvent - what can we sell").
Apple's next priority must be to replace the higher-end MBPs, iMac etc. and end the current silly situation where $2000+ Intel Macs are getting their clocks cleaned by $1000 entry-level Airs, and potential 16" MBP/iMac customers are being tempted to downsize to M1s. Not good for business.
It's really irrelevant whether that chip is called the "M2", the "M1X", the "P1" or "Rupert". AFAIK Apple haven't announced their naming plans for new Apple Silicon chips yet, so it is a bit premature to stickle.
I think they will. I think they will raise the MSRP from $1300 for the base MBP 13" now to something like $1500 and just have one version that you can configure to as much $$$ as you're willing to spend.
I think they will raise the Air MSRP to $1100 and upgrade the screen to a 14" Mini-LED. Then I think Apple will release a $750 Macbook SE with the exact same configuration as the current Air but with an M2 SoC.
I think it is common practice to see the soon to be previous model discounted, right before a new release. We have already seen $100 discounts. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a little more.
The lineup is clearer if you look it in another way. Apple is selling the M1 Mac with three case options: MBA 13", MBP 13", and Mac Mini. Because almost everything is integrated in the M1 package, all three are fundamentally the same device.
We may see the same in higher-end Macs if Apple wants to keep things integrated. There may be an M1X Mac with certain CPU/GPU/RAM options and I/O capacity, and then you can choose between the MBP 13", MBP 16", iMac 21.5", and iMac 27" cases. Or maybe MBP 14" and iMac 24". While Apple may choose to disable some functionality in the lower-tier cases or not offer some upgrades for them, all M1X Macs should be fundamentally the same. If they want to offer more performance in the MBP 16" and iMac 27" models, they need a bigger "M1Y" package or less integration. The latter could mean external RAM or a discrete GPU.
My feeling is that it depends on what Apple can keep the costs of the gen 2 Apple Silicon laptops down to. If they can add the M2 and an miniLED screen and keep the same price points, then I can imagine them keeping the current low end MBA around at $799 next year (possibly with 128 GB SSD to further reduce costs). If they can't keep the costs down, then I think that the base level MBA with M2 miniLED will be $1199 and they may well keep the M1 MBA on at $999 - possibly with the 8-GPU core M1 as I'd imagine yields will have improved by then as we saw with the A12X to A12Z.
I think Apple will raise prices in the near future, they were just cautious not to launch the M1 at to high price point. They need to get many units into the market in order to get developers attention to make native apps (avoid what happened to Windows RT)
When things are going well, first gen. problems are ironed out, and there is enough native software and the broad public realize how good these machines are, then Apple will raise the price.
I recently bought my entry level MBP M1 with a discount that put it at the same price as a entry level MBA M1 ?
When things are going well, first gen. problems are ironed out, and there is enough native software and the broad public realize how good these machines are, then Apple will raise the price.
I recently bought my entry level MBP M1 with a discount that put it at the same price as a entry level MBA M1 ?
This is an interesting topic.
IMHO, Apple doesn't need to do this because the M1 systems already have best-in-class performance and they are among the best bang for your buck performers across the entire computing industry. That said, I think your point about the market share is interesting. Even when the M2 (or whatever it is called) releases, these M1 Macs may still be among the best performers across the PC market. A major price drop might make sense to pull in users who have not used Mac before. I imagine Apple has been and is studying this very closely to determine how they can increase that global market share, as Apple Silicon is the perfect opportunity to do this.
I'm already seeing many of the people who were adamantly against purchasing a Mac (I'm talking hardcore Windows users) begin to question if perhaps they should try a M1 Mac. That one last incentive might be the feather that tips the scale to bring them into the ecosystem.
IMHO, Apple doesn't need to do this because the M1 systems already have best-in-class performance and they are among the best bang for your buck performers across the entire computing industry. That said, I think your point about the market share is interesting. Even when the M2 (or whatever it is called) releases, these M1 Macs may still be among the best performers across the PC market. A major price drop might make sense to pull in users who have not used Mac before. I imagine Apple has been and is studying this very closely to determine how they can increase that global market share, as Apple Silicon is the perfect opportunity to do this.
I'm already seeing many of the people who were adamantly against purchasing a Mac (I'm talking hardcore Windows users) begin to question if perhaps they should try a M1 Mac. That one last incentive might be the feather that tips the scale to bring them into the ecosystem.