But no one is being forced to buy Apple products.. people pay exorbitant Apple upgrade prices because they want to. There are cheaper Windows machines available.
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Rant about the new Mac Mini.
- Thread starter neomorpheus
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So your main disagreement for an external drive is its “random looking”? I guess, but if it really bothers you, you can hide it somewhere. I completely understand wanting a clean looking desk.
You do realize we’re talking about an Apple product, right? You want reasonably priced and you want an upgraded not even the base model Apple product? I want a reasonably priced 7 series BMW and I know that’s not too much to ask, but I don’t think I’m going to get it. As long as I can remember higher end Apple products were always much more expensive. You could get the base model, but once you started adding upgrades, it was out of control. This is why I always say don’t buy more than you need.
I get it looking at an external drive can be annoying, but you can hide it if it really bothers you that much. I attached my backup Time Machine SSD with Velcro to the back of my iMac. The only way I could see it is if I physically moved the iMac. If your drive is slow than likely you need to upgrade. It’s not going to be as fast as internal storage, but it shouldn’t be anything close to slow. Also, you say it’s dangling? Please don’t dangle an SSD by the cable. I know people do that but it can cause problems with your USB ports.
Have you ever heard of the saying people want their cake and eat it too? I always felt that saying was silly, but it applies here. I think it’s OK to want things, but you have to understand sometimes if it’s not realistic, don’t expect them.
It’s not realistic to expect an upgraded Apple computer to be affordable in the same sense that a Windows machine is. Sure the Mac mini sounds affordable at about $600 but you can get a Windows mini PC for about half that. These higher prices also apply to upgrades.
It’s the same way you can get 3 series BMW for about 50k or a Toyota Corolla for about half that. Both will get you to work so you have to determine which one you want.
But there are two sides to the issue. One is the consumers, some of which cannot afford but the cheapest Apple product they want or need, while the rest can afford buying anything Apple trows at them. The other side is Apple making as much profit as possible, something that is not wrong. While I like some of the Apple products and can afford buying them, I can also sympathize with those consumers who feel that Apple gouges the consumers.
Apple as well as some other companies are offering devices that cannot by upgraded by the user. It means that the new device becomes "old" or even obsolete two or three years later. For example, I am still using my 2019 iMac (27" screen) for photo editing, and right after receiving it from the Apple Store I removed the 2 Apple RAM modules, and replaced them with Crucial RAM modules (lots memory). Nowadays I can even remove the 2TB Fusion drive and replace it with a 2TB or greater SSD at a cost of $200.00.
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No. People want MacOS or MacBook quality hardware not to pay absurd prices for what costs Apple a few dollars. The problem isn’t the base pricing. The problem is the ridiculousness in buying a system that will actually work for each person. 256GB or 512GB doesn’t get much done. I mean the iPhone PM starts with 256GB and it’s just a phone. A Mac should start with 1TB base given how cheap it would be. The nickel and diming your customers to ensure you get shareholders maximum return is absurd.
This conversation has devolved into arguing about Capitalism.
Why didnt Chrysler give me all the options on the Minivan that I just bought? I got the vinyl seats and the Napa Leather was two trim packages up and almost 10K more. I know they could put Napa leather in every trim package and make a profit.
"Mac upgrades for each according to their ability, and mac upgrades for each according to their needs."
Why didnt Chrysler give me all the options on the Minivan that I just bought? I got the vinyl seats and the Napa Leather was two trim packages up and almost 10K more. I know they could put Napa leather in every trim package and make a profit.
"Mac upgrades for each according to their ability, and mac upgrades for each according to their needs."
Hehe, you're close enough on the meaning, essentially two things that can't both be true, but the very old original saying was "you can't eat your cake and have it too" and later got turned around with the have before eat.
You can't use your Apple gift card and still have it too. 🥲
Hmm no, I haven't bought anything.
As a matter of fact, sold my MBP 2018 for this and I might end up simply buying a server and virtualize MacOS, together with Windows and run Fedora or Ubuntu on the main PC.
Or buying a base mini, use the student discount of 100, upgrade memory to 24 GB and wait for someone to start selling bigger ssds.
Also looking at used Mac's.
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No kidding. Thank you for the additional information. That just makes it all the better.
That’s not true. The problem is when there’s no standard in play, and one must buy the upgrades from Apple at exorbitant pricing. One could make leather seats and put them in the car. One cannot use any interoperable parts in a Mac as Apple owns the entire vertical and horizontal platform. It’s a monopoly and monopolies are not good for capitalism. At the very least, they’re the largest anticompetitive company in the history of modern time. That’s not what capitalism is supposed to be. Free market capitalism means no horizontal and vertical monopolizations.
Anyone can take a Tesla electric motor and install it in a Ford as they can make it interoperable. Nobody can do the same with Apple as they have made everything proprietary. And yet this is the same Apple that cried about Qualcomm not giving FRAND fair reasonable and non discriminatory patents available for the price Apple wanted to pay. It’s the same thing here. Apple wants to dominate every aspect and control every bit of this monopoly they have created.
When companies become so large they destroy competition and take advantage of consumers, they do not benefit society. I believe Google and Meta also fall under these categories. The problem is Apple is the only one that controls entirely the whole vertical and horizontal monopoly.
Look at what happens when Walmart ran free with no regulation. They put out of business the American dream of entrepreneurship for small business owners selling products. Walmart just undercut and eliminated them. This is why the EU doesn’t allow such practices. It’s not about not allowing capitalism. It’s allowing free-market capitalism without allowing massive companies to dominate and destroy.
Amazon is another company that has done exactly the same thing. They threaten even Walmart. Capitalism is a good thing as long as it’s controlled to not allow anticompetitive practices by massive corporations. Amazon sold for less than cost for years. Even took advantage of the USPS.
People will not band together and boycott companies because greed of lower pricing they think is good. But in the end it destroys whole economies. That’s inevitable for so many countries that don’t regulate anticompetitive practices by mega corporations.
I don’t understand people supporting how Apple does business. I get people supporting purchasing Apple products because their sticky ecosystem works wonders. The reality is there’s no reason we couldn’t have interoperability amongst all devices and even regulate that USBC be required just like a standard NAND be required to be repairable via user. The Mac mini and Mac Studio have them but again they’re proprietary. Standards are a good thing that protect consumers.
Until people stand up and say no more, only the top 1% will thrive.
Apple is not a monopoly. Period.
They are not competing on price either, but they have chosen to add/keep an entry level in order to provide an affordable (not cheap, but affordable) access to their ecosystem. That serves as a recruitment service - they get a more pleasant volume and customer inside the ecosystem which may trade up.
They have plenty competition both for laptops, desktops, cellulars, pads, mice, keyboards, monitors, speakers, cables and what not.
Amazon and Walmart are very different beasts entirely, and IF you want to compare anything in the world of computers with those, It will be the Wintel constellation. They did actually seek monopoly and almost got it.
I have never, and don`t know about anybody else who have been forced to choose Macs/iPhones/iPads due to lack of alternatives. I do know people who have been forced to abandon Macs and I have been forced to abandon Linux. But never Macs/iPhones/iPads.
Apple is a publicly held company and have to report earnings every quarter; they have a shareholder's obligation to maximize profits as much as possible; this means they have to maximize the margins on their hardware products as much as possible; this means that the base Mac mini with 256 GB of storage allows them to generate those margins that allow them to generate the most profits and appease their shareholders and Wall St and keep the stock price up.
Also, there is competition in form of Windows and PCs; so Apple doesn't have to go after market share because Windows and PCs have that part of the market to themselves.
Can get top of the line Samsung 990 Pro 2TB for $78 while Apple charges $800 to upgrade 256GB to 2TB.
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I agree with storage, but Apple is in a weird position with unified memory. The m4 pro mini with 64gb ram costs 2000. That machine can allocate around 40gb vram. To get that amount in a pc, you'd have to get an a6000, for 4000, then build a machine around it. The mac will be slower, but for many it's about can it run over how fast it can run.
Apple's upgrade prices are horribly expensive for system ram, while dirt cheap for vram. And the funny thing is, the more you get, the per gb price goes down. To go from 24 to 48 is 400, but to go from 48 to 64 is just 200. The upgrades up to 32 should be way cheaper, while anything above that is in high vram, ideal for AI territory, which could be even more expensive compared to the value it gives.
That part of my rant.
Apple has no good reason (besides fleecing us) for their exorbitant, dare I say, anticonsumer, prices for standard parts.
The fact that they went out of their way to make sure that WE cannot simply buy standard drives to do such a simple upgrade is simply deplorable.
But the fanbois will still fight this until the bitter end.
Reminds me when one of the Kartrashians was close to become a BILLIONARIE and her fans started sending her money, so she could reach the billion dollar mark.
Thats insanity.
Exactly.
They dont use magical parts, blessed by Jobs zombie corpse. They are using standard NANDs that everyone else is using.
I understand the need for the RAM to be in the SOC, since its part of the design, but the storage is one million percent BS and a big FU to us their customers.
That is all sweet and dandy, but why doesnt it bother you that they are taking you for a ride?
Why is that apple fans keep defending poor Apple at their own expense?
More than an FU to their customers it’s a nod to the shareholders. That’s been my point. Tim is great at serving his masters - the shareholders. He has devastated the customers, developers, and even competition. He did it for the money. End of story. The long run has always shown that there will be something better that takes over. Without a product person in charge, it cannot be Apple that reinvents and makes new discoveries. It will be other companies that will rise and Apple will fall. Tim was great for shareholders but terrible for long term viability of the company. Steve was great for customers and innovation and didn’t give two cents what the shareholders wanted. It went so far that people thought AAPL should be a privately-held corporation. Now, it’s the largest anticompetitive corporation to ever exist.
No, the two are not equivalent. Look at amazon, posted losses for years, but in the long term that maximized shareholder value. What Apple does is only good for short-term and earning those sweet executive bonuses. Maximizing long-term shareholder value would have been switching to a growth strategy when apple silicon came out. Tim preach about service revenue but does nothing to increase the user base, just burns cash at new services like Apple TV. Using that money on a competitive pricing strategy would have put Apple into a much better position long-term. They are also sitting on 65 billion in cash equivalent, which does next to nothing to increase shareholder value.
Late to the party but if you're not trolling here then... actually I wouldn't be surprised if you were being serious given it's the MR forums.
Perception of quality is the only reason Apple became a trillion dollar corpo. The speeds on the basic $50 1TB gen 4 NvME drive in my Lenovo prebuild from COVID days absolutely embarrass the specs on the storage used by Apple.
Apple are genuinely still using 2015 SSD speeds across the board. The industry has long left Apple behind when it comes to technology standards, but bean counter Timmy is solely responsible for that.
Actually I say solely, but the legions of rabid Apple fans who drop $2k on Facebook machines are the real issue.
There's always toxic fanboy v fanboy discussions, but I genuinely try to help people in the real world make good tech decisions for the products they buy, and it's sad how many Apple evangelists will treat you with disdain at the mere suggestion that a value pick at a quarter of the price of the Apple equivalent actually performs the same or better in daily usage.
Value is subjective so it is only for the individual and the market to decide. That's why I don't involve myself with these types of debates except to point that out, plus another idea that is often overlooked:
The only consistently accurate way to judge the value of a product (even subjectively) is by looking at its entire package*. Specs, performance, design, build, OS, apps, ecosystem integration, support, privacy/security--everything, basically the entire UX of a product, seen as a whole along with its price. Then that can be compared to the entire package of a competitor along with its price, and a value judgement can then be made by the individual and in turn the market.
However, the tendency I see in these forums is to make a micro comparison and judge value based on that, but that is often not accurate because micro comparisons are often not 1-to-1. Companies' pricing strategies can differ, so they can build different costs into packages differently. For instance, many people compare Apple's storage and RAM upgrade prices to that of the competition and conclude unfair prices, but not many seem to compare Microsoft's OS and app prices to that of Apple (free) and conclude unfair prices. In that case they seem to understand the different pricing strategies at play. Or they don't care because they simply don't want Microsoft's software. But the fact is both cost real money to produce, and the two companies have distributed those costs differently.
That said, not everything in a package will be of value to every individual, which is why different packages exist.
*It appears OP has instinctually done precisely this--judged value based on the entire package and decided Apple's was better.
The only consistently accurate way to judge the value of a product (even subjectively) is by looking at its entire package*. Specs, performance, design, build, OS, apps, ecosystem integration, support, privacy/security--everything, basically the entire UX of a product, seen as a whole along with its price. Then that can be compared to the entire package of a competitor along with its price, and a value judgement can then be made by the individual and in turn the market.
However, the tendency I see in these forums is to make a micro comparison and judge value based on that, but that is often not accurate because micro comparisons are often not 1-to-1. Companies' pricing strategies can differ, so they can build different costs into packages differently. For instance, many people compare Apple's storage and RAM upgrade prices to that of the competition and conclude unfair prices, but not many seem to compare Microsoft's OS and app prices to that of Apple (free) and conclude unfair prices. In that case they seem to understand the different pricing strategies at play. Or they don't care because they simply don't want Microsoft's software. But the fact is both cost real money to produce, and the two companies have distributed those costs differently.
That said, not everything in a package will be of value to every individual, which is why different packages exist.
*It appears OP has instinctually done precisely this--judged value based on the entire package and decided Apple's was better.
Can only speak for yours truly:
Everyone KNOWS they take you for a ride with upgrades, and it is not about defending "poor Apple".
The reality IS: This is their business model, and I am entirely free to choose if I want to get Apple products or not. I can get more or less everything I do done on Windows and Linux, and I prefer services and software allowing me to swap if I want to. But I don`t. If YOU do, you are entirely free to abandon Apple, their hardware, their business model and their ecosystem anytime you like.
You have to relate to the field you are playing on whether you like it or not. If you don`t, it is easy to walk the talk and get something which suits your preferred take.
In case you are not aware: Within the digital ecosphere, Apple hardware is considered to be of high quality and it resides in the premium market, bordering the luxury market. What you pay extra for is a certain level of (premium) quality and the sniff of luxury. Luxury pricing isn`t driven by spec. It is driven by desireable products and the illusion of image these products bestow upon the owner in the owner`s mind.
That`s why whatever you see of Microsoft branded portable machines are trying to achieve. They add a bit of spec to become as desireable as Apple objects. They want to charge you what Apple do.
Try moving out of the consumer market and get a high spec Thinkpad or equal, they were never cheap at all. And that is without the slightest notion of luxury.
The 512/16 M4 Mini is £250 cheaper than when I bought my 512/16 M1, so I consider that a good deal. An even better one when I eventually pick one up in a sale…
It's one of those things where you're so used to being crapped on that when you get a sniff of Febreeze everything seems rosy in the world.