I can't buy a MacBook Air for less than $999, and that's for a model with 8GB RAM, an 8-core CPU and 256GB SSD. The equivalent (based on raw specs) in the PC world runs for $300 to $500.
How is something that is twice as expensive as the competition not a luxury device?
EDIT: Because there's repeated confusion in the replies: I am not saying that a MacBook Air is not objectively a better device. I'm saying it is better by metrics that fall strictly into the "luxury" category.
Better build quality, system-on-a-chip, better OS, better battery life, aluminum case—all of these are luxury characteristics that someone who is looking for a functional device that meets their needs at a decent price won't have as dealbreakers.
> How is something that is twice as expensive as the competition not a luxury device?
You can buy a version of <insert product here> from Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods dealer?
Is my diner a luxury restaurant because a burger costs twice as much as McDonald's?
When I buy a Rick Owens coat for $3k, sure it's a luxury good. It protects from the elements just the same, I know that I overpay only because it looks nice. But when I pay the same for the device I need for my work and use for 12 hours a day, it’s not luxury — it's just common sense. I've tried working with Windows and Linux, and I know that I'm paying not only for specs, but because the sum of all the qualities will result in a much better experience — which will allow me to work (and earn money) faster and with less headache.
$1000 for a laptop that will last 10 years seems crazy to call a luxury, when we have Alienware/apple laptops that go for 2k to 5k+ and demographics that buys them yearly.
I bought a 300 euro ThinkPad that's going on 9 years now.
It was my only computer for the entire time until about a week ago, when I bought another 300 euro ThinkPad. I also didn't have a smartphone, only a basic dumbphone for a large portion of that time.
So for me, yes, MacBook Airs, like the lovely M1 I'm writing this on (I love my job!) are luxury goods.
Just because Ferraris cost half a million doesn't mean a 50k BMW isn't luxury.
> You can buy a version of <insert product here> from Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods dealer?
What percent of that retailer's products does that comparison apply to?
If it's more than half then yeah that's probably a luxury goods dealer.
> The equivalent (based on raw specs) in the PC world runs for $300 to $500.
Equivalent device?! Find me Windows laptop in ANY price category that can match weight, fanless design, screen quality, battery life, speakers quality and battery life of Air.
I got a Latitude 9430 on eBay for $520. This thing is an amazing laptop and I'd put it right there with the Macs I have to work with at dayjob, as far as build quality/feel.
That's still ~twice as expensive as the items I linked to below, and that's at clearance prices.
A good deal on a luxury item still gets you a luxury item.
And if we want to compare Walmart to Walmart, this thing currently runs for $359 and has 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a CPU that benchmarks slightly faster than the M2:
No brand new laptop has a 1h battery. Also, battery life importance as in "I can work a full day unplugged from AC" it's something that affects only a subset of laptop users, and mostly during some specific conditions (i.e. long travels).
That's more like cheap vs middle of the road. There is no luxury space in laptops - displays, iPads, and workstations maybe but that's it (and those are more pro than luxury).
$999 amortized over 3 years is $30/mo which is less than what even middle class people spend on coffee.
I doubt I am alone in saying that I would gladly pay twice the price to avoid having to use Windows. It's the most user-hostile, hand-holdy, second-guess-and-confirm-my-explicit-command-ey os I've used to date. And bloatware baked in? No thanks.
You're probably right. I am in the middle-class, maybe lower middle-class, and I live in the US. I have advantages and opportunities that many in other circumstances do not and I am sincerely grateful for them.
Oh dear. 16:10 screen with superior resolution, brightness and gamut - and it still gets superior battery life driving all those pixels.. that’s a headline feature that even a non-propellerhead can observe (I was honestly surprised when I looked up that Acer screen what a dim, narrow piece of shit it is) - notably there are ballpark priced systems with better screens.
I think you unjustifiably downplay how much of a selling point a screen that looks great (or at least decent) on the floor is. And I know tons of devs that put up with the 45% NTSC abominations on Thinkpads that aren’t even suitable for casual photo editing or web media, just because you make do with that doesn’t automatically make a halfway decent display on a laptop a “luxury”.
Sorry, but don’t buy the “everything that isn’t a $300 econo shit laptop is luxury” thesis repeated ad nauseum.
"Luxury" often includes some amount of pure status symbols added to the package, and often on what is actually a sub-par experience. The quintessential luxury tech device were the Vertu phones from just before and even early in the smartphone era - mid-range phones tech and build quality-wise, with encrusted gems and gold inserts and other such bling, sold at several thousand dollars (Edit: they actually ranged between a few thousand dollars all the way to 50,000+).
But the definition of luxury varies a lot by product category. Still, high-end and luxury are separate concepts, which ven when they do overlap.
You just made up the "sub-par experience" as a defining point of a luxury product.
A luxury product is defined by being a status symbol (check for all Apple devices) and especially by its price.
A luxury car like a Bentley will still you bring from point A to point B like the cheapest Toyota.
I didn't say that sub-par experience was a requirement, I said it was often a part of luxury products. Or, more precisely, I should have said that something being of excellent build quality and offering excellent, top of the line experience is neither sufficient nor necessary for being a luxury good.
It is true though that luxury goods are, often, top of the line as well. Cars and watches are often examples of this. Clothes are a much more mixed bag, with some luxury brands using excellent materials and craftsmanship, while others use flashy design and branding with mediocre materials and craftsmanship.
Exactly where Apple sits is very debatable in my experience. I would personally say that many of their products are far too affordable and simple to be considered luxury products - the iPhone in particular. The laptops I'm less sure about.
Fair enough.
Apple is clearly not in the same luxury league like a Bentley or a yatch, but it's totally like a Mercedes, to continue with the car analogy. You get a "plus" for the extra money but then it's open for debate whether that "plus" is worth or not. And it's actually the source of many flamewars on the Internet.
I think the Mercedes comparison (or the more common BMW) one is also useful for getting the idea that not every manufacturer is competing for the same segments but the prices in segments are generally close. No Mercedes is as cheap as a Camry but a Lexus is similar.
This comes up so often in these flame wars where people are really saying “I do/don’t think you need that feature” and won’t accept that other people aren’t starting from the same point. I remember in the 90s reading some dude on Fidonet arguing that Macs were overpriced because they had unnecessary frills like sound cards and color displays; I wasn’t a Mac user then but still knew this was not a persuasive argument.
That would also apply to Apple products then, and especially so to their laptops. I actually bought a MacBook Air recently and the thing that I like most about it is how comfortable the keyboard and especially the trackpad is compared even to high-end ThinkPads. And, on the other hand, the trackpad on my T14s is certainly quite sufficient to operate it, so this comfort that MacBook offers is beyond the bare necessity of function.
By that definition, Zara is a luxury clothing brand, Braun is a luxury appliance maker, and Renault is a luxury car brand. I think it requires significantly more.
The Walmart variant was introduced 6 weeks ago to offload excess stocks of a four year old discontinued model. I'm not sure your argument of "at only 70% of the price of a model two generations newer" is the sales pitch you think it is.
They’re tools. This attempt to treat them as luxury goods doesn’t hold with those. It’s entirely common for even people who want to do some home repair—let alone professionals—but aren’t clueless about DIY to spend 2x the cheapest option, because they know the cheapest one is actually worth $0. More will advocate spending way more than 2x, as long as you’re 100% sure you’re going to use it a lot (like, say, a phone or laptop, even for a lot of non-computer-geeks). This is true even if they’re just buying a simple lowish-power impact driver, nothing fancy, not the most powerful one, not the one with the most features. Still, they’ll often not go for the cheapest one, because those are generally not even fit for their intended purpose.
[edit] I mean sure there are people who just want the Apple logo, I’m not saying there are zero of those, but they’re also excellent, reliable tools (by the standards of computers—so, still bad) and a good chunk of their buyers are there for that. Even the ones who only have a phone.
I didn't go for the cheapest option: I'm typing this on a laptop that I bought a few months ago for $1200. It has an aluminum case, 32GB RAM, an AMD Ryzen CPU that benchmarks similar to the M3, and 1TB SSD. I can open it up and replace parts with ease.
The equivalent from Apple would currently run me $3200. If I'm willing to compromise to 24GB of RAM I can get one for $2200.
What makes an Apple device a luxury item isn't that it's more expensive, it's that no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider. The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.
Note that there's nothing wrong with buying a luxury item! It's entirely unsurprising that most people on HN looking at the latest M4 chip prefer luxury computers, and that's fine!
Huh. Most of the folks I know on Apple stuff started out PC (and sometimes Android—I did) and maybe even made fun of Apple devices for a while, but switched after exposure to them because they turned out to be far, far better tools. And not even much more expensive, if at all, for TCO, given the longevity and resale value.
Eh, I have to use a MacBook Pro for work because of IT rules and I'm still not sold. Might be because I'm a Linux person who absolutely must have a fully customizable environment, but MacOS always feels so limited.
The devices are great and feel great. Definitely high quality (arguably, luxury!). The OS leaves a lot to be desired for me.
I spent about a decade before switching using Linux as my main :-) Mostly Gentoo and Ubuntu (man, it was good in the first few releases)
Got a job in dual-platform mobile dev and was issued a MacBook. Exposure to dozens of phones and tablets from both ecosystem. I was converted within a year.
(I barely customize anything these days, fwiw—hit the toggle for “caps as an extra ctrl”, brew install spectacle, done. Used to have opinions about my graphical login manager, use custom icon sets, all that stuff)
> no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider
On the phone side, I guess you would call Samsung and Google luxury providers? On the laptop side there are a number of differentiating features that are of general interest.
> The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people
Things that might matter to regular people (and tool users):
- design and build for something you use all day
- mic and speakers that don't sound like garbage (very noticeable and relevant in the zoom/hybrid work era)
- excellent display
- excellent battery life
- seamless integration with iPhone, iPad, AirPods
- whole widget: fewer headaches vs. Windows (ymmv); better app consistency vs. Linux
- in-person service/support at Apple stores
It's hard to argue that Apple didn't reset expectations for laptop battery life (and fanless performance) with the M1 MacBook Air. If Ryzen has caught up, then competition is a good thing for all of us (maybe not intel though...) In general Apple isn't bleeding edge, but they innovate with high quality, very usable implementations (wi-fi (1999), gigabit ethernet (2001), modern MacBook Pro design (2001), "air"/ultrabook form factors (2008), thunderbolt (2011), "retina" display and standard ssd (2012), usb-c (2016), M1: SoC/SiP/unified memory/ARM/asymmetric cores/neural engine/power efficiency/battery life (2020) ...and occasionally with dubious features like the touchbar and butterfly keyboard (2016).)
Looking even further back in Apple laptop history, we find interesting features like rear keyboard placement (1991), 4 pound laptop with dock for desktop use (1992), and trackpad (1994). Apple's eMate 300 (1997) was a Newton laptop rather than a Mac, but it had an ARM processor, flash storage, and 20+ hour battery life, making it something of an ancestor to the Mac M1.
Once Arm and battery life shift occurs with Linux and Windows, they'll (ie. Apple) be on the front foot again with something new, that's the beauty of competition.
>The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.
Here lies the rub, ARE those the stats that matter? Or does the screen, touchpad, speakers, battery life, software, support services, etc. matter more?
I feel people just TOTALLY gloss over the fact that Apple is crushing the competition in terms of trackpads + speakers + battery life, which are hardly irrelevant parts of most people's computing experience. Many people hardly use their computers to compute - they mostly use them to input and display information. For such users, memory capacity and processing performance ARE frills, and Apple is a market leader where it's delivering value.
Also even in compute, apple is selling computers with a 512-bit or 1024-bit LPDDR5x bus for a lower price than you can get from the competition. Apple is also frequently leading the pack in terms of compute/watt. This has more niche appeal, but I've seen people buy Apple to run LLM inferencing 24/7 while the Mac Studio sips power.
Lenovo Thinkpad p14s(t14) gen 4, 7840U, $1300, oled 2.8K 400 nits P3, 64gb RAM, 1TB, keyboard excellent, speakers shitty(using sony wh-1000xm4), battery(52.5Wh) life not good not bad, OLED screen draws huge amount of power. weight ~3 lb.
This spec costs 2k euro in NL. Fully specd Air (15 inch) is 2,5k euro, with arguably better everything except RAM and is completely silent. Doesn’t look that much different to me in terms of price.
Also, those things aren't even true about Apple devices. Apple fanboys have been convinced that their hardware really is way better than everything else for decades. It has never been true and still isn't.
Clean os install? You haven't used windows in a while have you?
Im a Linux guy but am forced to use Mac's and windows every now and then.
Windows has outpaced macos for a decade straight.
Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It's constantly bugging me for passwords for random things. It is objectively the worst OS. I'd rather work on a Chromebook.
I think he has different critera on what bothers him, thats okay though isn't it. I get a little annoyed at anything where I have to use a touchpad, not enough to rant about it, but it definitely increases friction (haha) in my thought process.
What metrics are you using for build quality? Admittedly I don't know a ton of mac people (I'm an engineer working in manufacturing) but the mac people I know, stuff always breaks, but they're bragging about how apple took care of it for free.
My Acer Aspire lasted me for tens of thousands of hours of use and abuse by small children over 6 years until I replaced it this year because I finally felt like I wanted more power. That's the Toyota Camry of laptops.
The features that Apple adds on top of that are strictly optional. You can very much prefer them and think that they're essential, but that doesn't make it so. Some people feel that way about leather seats.
tl;dr is that Walmart is also selling an Acer for $359 that beats that device on every headline metric.
It's nice to know that I could get the old-gen model for slightly cheaper, but that's still an outrageous price if the MacBook Air isn't to be considered a luxury item.
My last Acer lasted me six years until I decided to replace it for more power (which, notably, I would have done with a MacBook by then too). They're not as well built as a MacBook, but they're well built enough for the average laptop turnover rate.
If it was actually bad value they wouldn't sell as high as they do and review with as much consumer satisfaction as they do.
These products may not offer you much value and you don't have to buy them. Clearly plenty of people and institutions bought them because they believed they offered the best value to them.
If people were actually rational that might be true, but they aren't. Apple survives entirely on the fact that they have convinced people they are cool, not because they actually provide good value.
Agreed. I'd definitely make the same arguments here as I would for an Audi. There's clearly a market, and that means they're not a bad value for a certain type of person.
Yes, but having all three of those things (well, specs/performance is probably just one thing, but treating them as separate as you did means that I don't have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out what a third thing would actually be) IS, in fact, a luxury.
Nobody is away from a power source for longer than 18 hours. MOST people don't need the performance that a macbook air has, their NEEDS would be met by a raspberry pi... that is, basic finances, logging into various services, online banking, things that first world citizens "rely" on.
The definition of luxury is "great comfort and extravagance", and every current Apple product fits that definition. Past Apple definitely had non-luxury products, as recently as the iPhone C (discontinued 10 years ago)... but Apple has eliminated all low-value options from their lineup.
When you're breaking out SSD speeds you're definitely getting into the "luxury" territory.
As I said in another comment:
The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.
They're average. A 512GB M3 MBA gets like 3000MBps for read/write. A 1TB Samsung 990 Pro, which costs less than the upgrade from 256GB to 512GB on the Air is over twice as fast. And on base models Apple skimps and speeds are slower.
Good question, I think the answer is even at thousands a window device battery can't hit 18 hour specs. Can someone name a windows device even at 2k+ that acts like an M chip? In fact the pricier windows usually mean GPU and those have worse battery then cheap windows(my 4090 is an hour or so off charge)
I am all in on Apple, to be clear. Mac Pros, multiple MBPs, Studio, Pro Display XDR, multiple Watches, phones, iPad Pro.
My experiences (multiple) with Genius Bar have been decidedly more "meh" to outright frustrating, versus "luxury", oftentimes where I know more than the Genius.
Logic Board issues where on a brand new macOS install I could reproducibly cause a kernel panic around graphics hardware. There was an open recall (finally, after waiting MONTHS) on this. It covered my Mac. But because it passed their diagnostic tool, they would only offer to replace the board on a time and materials basis.
I had a screen delamination issue. "It's not that bad - you can't see it when the screen is on, and you have to look for it". Huh. Great "luxury" experience.
And then the multiple "we are going to price this so outrageously, and use that as an excuse to try to upsell". Like the MBA that wouldn't charge due to a circuit issue. Battery fine, healthy. Laptop, fine, healthy, on AC. Just couldn't deliver current to the battery. Me, thinking sure, $300ish maybe with a little effort.
"That's going to be $899 to repair. That's only $100 less than a new MBA, maybe we should take a look at some of the new models?" Uh, no. I'm not paying $900 for a laptop that spends 99% (well, 100% now) of its life on AC power.
Is a Wendy’s burger luxury because it costs twice as much as McDonald’s?
Cost comparisons alone are stupid. And “this AMD benchmarks the same as an M2” is a useless comparison since regular people don’t buy laptops for raw compute power.
Really? You can find a laptop with the equivalent of Apple Silicon for $3-500? And while I haven't used Windows in ages I doubt it runs as well with 8 GB as MacOS does.
The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.
> the average person would consider a valid replacement
But what is that, exactly? If you look at all aspects of a laptop: CPU, RAM, SSD, battery life, screen quality, build quality, touchpad, OS, and put them in order of importance for the average consumer, what would be on top? I don't think it's the tech specs.
For instance, I would be willing to bet that for a large number of consumers, battery life is far more important than the tech specs, which means that a valid replacement for their MacBook must have equivalent battery life. You also have to consider things like the expected lifespan of the laptop and its resale value to properly compare their costs. It's not simple.
Curious what criteria you're using for using for qualifying luxury. It seems to me that materials, software, and design are all on par with other more expansive Apple products. The main difference is the chipset which I would argue is on an equal quality level as the pro chips but designed for a less power hungry audience.
Maybe for you, but I still see sales guys who refuse working on WinTel where basically what the do is browse internet and do spreadsheets - so mainly just because they would not look cool compared to other sales guys rocking MacBooks.
