- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.
There’s a reason why no-one bought IBM PS/2s. They were horrible value for money.
The real competition at the time was the thousands of other brands selling PCs. By that time IBM was plummeting in sales and other companies were selling most of the PCs. That’s where 95% of the market was.
Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.
My Apple IIC was the stuff back in the 80s.
It was also the last Apple product I owned.
apple was never cheaper than their competition, and when IBM got into PCs they were also not even comparable in quality anymore. Reality is that even in the early days apples was also more expensive and they relied on a dedicated fan base to sell their trash, to be fair they sorta earned their reputation in the super early PC space with actually good products but when IBM came in it had better PCs at lower prices and apple was basically riding on pure brand power. Then they had a few good hits with the ipad and later the iphone (tho the ipad was not as significant at the time as people seem to think it was looking back) and now they have been entirely eclipsed when it comes to phones and are once again reliant on hype and brand recognition.
It is not a unique history by any means but i feel it is especially egregious considering just how shit apple products are and how expensive they are.
You for got to mention the free and heavily discounted prices to get Mac computers into schools to get kids hooked on them. Which is something they still do to this I think.
So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
-
Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
-
And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
- Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
-
At the same time Windows is going down the drain, so if you compare removed to that it definitely has an edge. And that 8GB Air is not that expensive either… And fanboy can tell you it can swap to SSD so fast blah blah…
But if you have the knowledge to use Linux, there are less and less reasons to go even near removed computers…
The M2 Mac Mini is $599, or $499 if you can get the education discount. There is not a (new) Windows PC in that price range that has the same performance (especially performance-per-watt) and Thunderbolt 4. The M1 MacBook Air is getting a bit old, but it’s on sale for $600-700 pretty often and will knock the socks off most PCs in that price range, especially in build quality.
Apple’s pricing gets ridiculous when you try spec’ing up with certain memory or storage upgrades, sure, and most internal upgrades are a no-go. The base models of most of their computers are incredibly competitive, though.
Well now I just need apple to provide a real os.
I use Nixos btw.
If I’m buying a Mac personally I always buy a refurbished one. The machine has the same warranty but you save a couple hundred bucks.
At 600 you can get a computer with an actual graphics card. The only outstanding feature of the M1/2 macs is the very low power consumption, the rest is quite subpar.
It’s really up to personal preference but I’m a big fan of the metal unibody of Mac laptops. While my friends’ PC laptops plastic bodies were starting to separate and show wear, my laptop was still looking mint. That alone also helped determine how long I kept a Mac laptop going (I was on a 2017 MBP 13” up to just recently and the body is still near mint).
So while it could be perceived as a simple cosmetic preference, it was also about the longevity of the laptop’s use.
That said, I have an ASUS ROG Zephyrus that has a pretty solid body, despite being plastic. Some of them have gotten better, but a lot are still flimsy crap.
It’s the same reason I prefer the body of my iPhone, vs the multitude of plastic Android flagship phones I churned through back in the day. The G1 still holds a place in my heart though and had a metal body (and I still have it in its original box!)
I don’t want to downplay or invalidate any of your preferences, but you HEAVILY miss represent the competition. Have you seen a non apple device in the past 5 years?
Other companies make metal body PCs now. From the dinky cheap ass laptop I bought just for fun, to my sister’s proper gaming laptop, there’s plenty of metal+glass laptops out there. And when it comes to android I only really follow Samsung, Sony and Google, but at least those 3 have had metal+glass flagship phones since I care to remember. (looked it up, Sony: 2013, Samsung: 2015, Google: 2018)
A $600 PC with a dedicated graphics card is probably going to have a worse CPU than an M2 or M3 Mini, and probably no Thunderbolt. You would only be cross-shopping a PC like that with a Mac Mini if you were thinking of graphically-demanding productivity work, like video editing or Blender. If it’s for gaming then the Mac wouldn’t be in the running at all.
Except for their low draw and thus unmatched battery life on portable divides, the M chips are honestly not impressive performance wise. Not really the appeal, even tho Apple is trying tooth and nails to pretend that that’s a selling point with their unlabeled graphs.
I mean if you really don’t want a GPU (which IMO is a must, given proper hardware acceleration which makes up for any CPU short comings, but I digress), that leaves you with a much bigger budget for the CPU, and now it’s no longer close enough to the M chips, but an absolute slaughter.
This post was maybe true 5 years ago, but PC laptops have really started to suck. My macbook air was only $300 and it’s way better than my work’s $1k+ Dell laptop in terms of performance and battery life.
Macbook air is only $300???
Yes. Supplier markup is 50% above cost, so set up a price watch and wait for it to go on clearance. You’ll get it 50% off.
I got mine new at Best Buy last year when they were clearing out M1 stock.
Where is a macbook air $300? Off the back of a truck?
It doesn’t even do anything more especially for the price. Just make an AMD rig that blows it outta the water ez.
Just Capitalism Problems
You know, it’s not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.
Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.
The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.
Samsung’s Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.
The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn’t make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below “relatively high-end”, products in a particular category.
Can confirm on the MacBook side. My girlfriend got a m series macbook and it’s better than anything in it’s price range. That device is so snappy while having a battery life that’s incomparable to anything with windows
I’ve owned 4 MacBooks. A white plastic one, a 13" MBP, a 15" MBP, and now a 15" M2 Air.
I’ve had the Air for a year and I still can’t wrap my head around how it’s technically in a class below the fully specced 15" 2015 MBP, but outperforms it in literally every way. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that, even without Apple Silicon, computer tech jumped on in leaps and bounds in the 8 years between my last two, but the performance difference is astonishing.
Sure, it’s a lot of money for an ‘entry level’ laptop, but this fucker is going to last me ten years or more. When Apple no doubt drop OS support for it in a few years, Asahi Linux will almost certainly be rock solid enough to fully replace macOS.
Samsung offers a lot more models so they tend to have a higher high end and a lower low end than Apple.
That aged like milk lol
They meant that it costs less for apple, not the customer
That pin can be found for $30 or $35 on on ebay here and here, where it is described as being from the 80s and as an “employee pin”.
I was thinking that this might have been something aimed specifically at technology buyers in US schools in the 80s or 90s, to whom Apple offered substantial institutional discounts in a (relatively successful) effort to dominate that sector. However searching the phrase “does more costs less” i found this TV spot advertising the Quadra 605 which at $1000 was the cheapest computer Apple sold when it was introduced in October 1993 (and allegedly cheaper than something else they refer to as “PC Leading Brand” 😂). That system was sold under the LC and Performa brands up to 1996, but it was only sold as a Quadra until October 1994, so, to answer OP’s question: that slogan was in use at least sometime in that year.
What’s next? Google becoming evil ?
Impossible, they are so quirky they let their workers play xbox 360 at work, they are surely a good company with good intentions.
Luxury brand is what happened.
(First it was colored plastic.)
I love the look of colored plastics.
Join us at /3dprinting
They costed less back when the competition was the IBM PC, which cost as much as a car back in the 80s. Hasn’t been true for decades now.
I had an Apple ][+ in 1982 and an Apple ][c in 1984.
Cost less is a relative term depending on application.
They were cheaper than full business model IBM computers (who hadn’t much entered into the home computer market) but significantly more expensive than other home offerings such as commodore or (shudder) radio shack.
My username is from playing Thexder on my grandparents’ Apple ][gs. I had a lot of fun learning Basic on that computer.
Guess it’s as good a place as ever to remind everyone who uses Patreon that if you are subscribing through Patreon app on iOS that prices are going up in Sept by 50-60% and if you want to save money go through the actual website. This is Apple charging more not Patreon.
Why would anyone want to use an app for Patreon, anyway? It’s very much a browser experience.
I don’t disagree on the Patreon app point, but I sub to like 6 podcasts and never visit the app or website. For me it’s very much an RSS feed experience via my preferred podcast app.
It’s also PATREON fucking up. I’ve got a couple people i follow that are moving to Ghost as a hedge.
ghost?
nm I looked it up myself.
Why aren’t more people on ghost? It’s a stupid name for what it does, but the $9 a month and keeping the rest is a great deal if you have more than a handful of subscribers.
Ghost managed hosting gets more expensive as you get more subscribers, I don’t think Patreon does. You also have to set up the payments processor yourself (usually Stripe), and if you self-host, you need to set up an email service like Mailchimp. Ghost also has much more basic community features than Patreon, and doesn’t do per-user RSS feeds, so stuff like subscriber-only podcasts are more difficult.
The monopolistic shenanigans aside. I hope that companies also learn from this and have functional websites again and stop forcing people to apps. It’s gonna a be a win win
Apple is not charging 60% more. That is patreon. How this drivel spreads is beyond me. Apple charges 30%. This has been pretty fucking consistent for a decade. Patreon is telling creators to raise their prices because they (patreon) aren’t going to take the loss, they’re going to force it on their userbase. Patreon could easily just eat the 30% or even 15%, but that would cost them profits so they don’t. And then they claim Apple is costing users a 60% price increase. Fucking ridiculous.
You are mistaken there. 60% increase means that patreon gets just as much as they get now, because 60/160 is approx 30%.
Also, just eating 30% margin is absolutely a problem and far from easy
I’m not mistaken. Even Patreon doesn’t claim the apple change will cost 60%. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/11111747095181-Creator-fees-overview
And 60% of 160 is almost 40%, nice rounding down there to make your numbers sound better. And what the fuck does that have to do with anything anyways??? 30% of 100 is 30%. I’m saying that the creators shouldn’t have to do anything.
Why does Patreon even have a fucking app!? There’s no need for it at all. This ridiculous rise of companies creating useless apps just so they can harvest your info in addition to the info they’re already harvesting from you just signing up.
If they’re (Patreon) eating 30%, wouldn’t they lose money per transaction? I assume they take less than 30% of each subscription currently.
The most annoying thing is that in apples terms of service you are not allowed to tell people that you could go to the website for cheaper prices. Or if you don’t offer payments through the app store why you are doing it. (because of apples stupid fee)
Android isn’t really better, but at least you are allowed to link to websites that function out of the play store payments.
A study from 2022 found that deploying Macs in the enterprise has a lower TCO than Windows. Mainly because they have to buy less extra software and they don’t need as many IT staff to support them. Also, employees with Macs are more productive and do better on their performance reviews.
I don’t see this mentioned there, but that Apple has largely ignored enterprise works out as a strength; other companies wrote and open sourced pretty good tools. That can result in tools that better meet your needs, and generally will result in a lower TCO.
Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.
Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.
And since Macs are just UNIX machines under the hood, a lot of those open-source things are already built-in or can be added without much trouble.
Depends on the enterprise. If you’re a 1 user to 1 device shop maybe. If you’re an institution with shared devices…good fucking luck, be prepared to enter device management hell
MacOS supports PAM and LDAP just like any enterprise-class UNIX system, as well as lots of enterprise class device management tools such as InTune.
If you know what you’re doing, it’s more manageable than Windows, even.
