Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.
Their machines have always lasted. I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last
There has always been a healthy used apple market
Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...
> In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD.
Is it because BYD is more reliable or 'just' cheaper?
There are a number of folks for who H/T would be their first pick if not for (a) waitlists and/or (b) price considerations. And there a lot of folks who don't necessarily care if the car will last 10 or 15(+) years because they'll replace it earlier that that, so as long as it's 'good enough' it's fine.
Which is great to throw around numbers, but how are their reliability numbers? Before I throw out my 20 year old Honda for a BYD, how is the 20 year old BYD (or Telsa or Slate) doing? Unfortunately we don't know, though we're coming up on 29 years for Tesla soon.
The comment you're replying to is saying that in fair markets, BYD is taking market share away from Toyota even without the proven track record of reliability. Saying "But I wouldn't buy a BYD unless I knew it was reliable" is kind of missing the point.
> Toyota and Honda have competitors that are pretty interchangeable, like each other.
Do any of these competitors build "machines that can last" as much as Toyota and Honda? Does any other manufacturer have a longevity reputation of either of these two? What are the depreciation schedules of competitors (AIUI, T/H hold their value pretty well)?
Toyota and Honda have each other as direct competitors. If one of them sacrifices reliability, it's over. There are also second tier ones like Nissan making interchangeable cars, so if say Toyota stoops to Nissan's level, then they have to start selling at Nissan prices.
I would also say Ford, but their reputation for reliability applies only to their trucks.
When Ford and Mazda were working together they had some pretty reliable cars. My Focus outlasted two Hondas that I owned. The Hondas were "nicer" cars in terms of features and interior but mechanically the Ford kicked their asses.
Yeah, there was an era of good Focuses, also the Crown Vic. Crown Vic is probably their only car a random person will see and assume it's reliable, in the US at least.
Funny that Honda's hybrids seem to be licensing Toyota's eCVT magic, so it's quite a bit like Apple and Samsung, where they would be filling each other's pockets while also being at each other's throat.
Honda's hybrids are their own thing. They're mostly-series hybrids with one or two direct-drive gears for cruising speeds, as opposed to Toyota's parallel hybrid system.
In South Africa Toyotas (Hilux in particular) get stolen all the time because they are so reliable (and you get parts throughout Africa). So then you end up making new sales when people replace their stolen cars. One way to get around the problem for them I guess? /s :)
This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.
Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.
I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.
We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips
Problem? Aren't they selling like cake because of how good their MacBooks are? Other companies aren't that good and I imagine they don't sell as many laptops as Apple does.
Curious to know how many of these sales are 'corporate purchases' for fleets versus 'personal purchases'. Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product? How many have Lenovo/PC IT-managed work machines and also (choose to) purchase a PC for personal use versus choosing an Apple?
> Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product?
I certainly would, because I demand Linux on all my computers. I can't stand the idea of being forced to sacrifice x% of my disk for things like "Apple Intelligence" or other bloatware that Apple decided I can't remove because it is a "system component." That, plus all the privacy and user control issues posed by an operating system effectively remotely controlled by a third party.
I feel apple is huge mostly in the US, rest of the world apple has a reputation for being overpriced so people have mostly never used a Mac and if you have a lifetime of windows usage switching is jarring.. speaking from experience
50% of consumer spending is by the top 10% of consumers, with that 10% generally being Apple ecosystem people. Anyone with ecommmerce stats can confirm this, Apple consumers just shop and consume more, particularly at the high end.
This gives the impression that Apple are even bigger than they are.
I got the M4 mini and then bought a refurbished M1 MacBook air so I could ssh/remote desktop into my mini from the couch. Love that MacBook Air, cost like 200 bucks and is super-fast.
Yeah, my M1 mini with 16GB is great as a daily driver even on Golden Gate. Noticed some slowness recently indexing a huge mail archive, but otherwise I don't even really notice slowdowns.
+1100€ for the 2TB upgrade nowadays, thats not an "Apple tax" anymore thats just straight up robbery. Even a pcie gen5 nvme costs only about 300€, even with todays prices, so 600€ would be quite in line with Apple pricing, but 1100€!? Thats just being a dick.
Ranking SSDs by random-access performance, where Apple’s costly storage has typically excelled, shows prices ranging from 300-600 USD with cheap and costly outliers; the third-best drive is $360 USD, but the second-best at $450 has IIRC uniquely better thermals among highest-performance SSDs and so can be used at full speed in compact systems like a Mac Mini. That’s perhaps 390€, which is only a 2.8X price multiplier, rather than the 3.6X perceived if only comparing with high-heat, low-cost drives — but, in the live euro market, to the best that I can tell from overseas, this drive is only available at 450-500€, suggesting that in a direct comparison on the open market, Apple is only selling at a 2.4X-2.2X multiplier rather than at 3.6X as claimed.
I have no position on whether this ought to materially alter the outrage, but the point about low-heat components tends to get lost when comparing PC parts and Mac parts, so duly noted.
Those L1 cache specs have to be wrong, right? Bigger L1 on the e core than p core seems like it has to be incorrect (unless the lower clock lets them get away with something?)
The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.
I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.
$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.
I'm pretty darn happy with video games on my Mac. It can play the only two video games that I play: World of Warcraft and Baldur's Gate.
> I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
For me, the advantage is not being on Windows or Linux. If my PopOS/Manjaro setups hadn't introduced so many random issues with WoW on raid nights that it became a meme for my raid team, I might still be on Linux.
Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.
You'll be looking for a while, looks like they're going for $600-700 used currently. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $350 though. Macs don't depreciate nearly as quickly as PCs do.
The M6 and M5 haven’t shipped tet, just preorder stage so they’ll come down once the nee one’s land. A good proxy is the M2 mini dropping to ~$250 after the M4 hit.
I’m hopeful for even lower than $300 prices just because there’s a lot of homelab people spending a lot on these and the M5 ultra really does make the M4 not worth using for that use case. So there should be a flood shortly hopefully.
You seem to just be extrapolating based on old information and bad comparisons. Click through the $269 link. The M2 listing redirects to an Intel Mac mini model.
Apple trade-in value is currently $565 for the base 16GB/256GB M4 mini. (up from $480 a couple weeks ago)
> A good proxy is the M2 mini dropping to ~$250 after the M4 hit.
That's really not a good proxy, as the base price of EVERYTHING was way lower in 2024. Heck, that M2 mini you're referring to is selling for more than $250 today.
The link you're sharing is a scam - the $269 "2024 M2" takes you to a $269 2014 Intel Core i5 turd.
Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.
Their machines have always lasted. I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.
Yep, I was daily driving a Quadra 700 in 1998.
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last
There has always been a healthy used apple market
Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last.
So do Toyota and Honda, and their sales seems be pretty steady.
In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD.
For example, sales for the first half of 2026 vs first half of 2025 in Australia show:
Toyota is down 20% BYD is up 68%
> In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD.
Is it because BYD is more reliable or 'just' cheaper?
There are a number of folks for who H/T would be their first pick if not for (a) waitlists and/or (b) price considerations. And there a lot of folks who don't necessarily care if the car will last 10 or 15(+) years because they'll replace it earlier that that, so as long as it's 'good enough' it's fine.
^ why are people downvoting this comment, they are objective facts.
Which is great to throw around numbers, but how are their reliability numbers? Before I throw out my 20 year old Honda for a BYD, how is the 20 year old BYD (or Telsa or Slate) doing? Unfortunately we don't know, though we're coming up on 29 years for Tesla soon.
Frag,
I am engaging in this from a "Logic 101" perspective. I saw a false premise used in an argument and I only wanted to point that out.
I have no actual position on cars brands or apple computers or any of that.
14 years, really, if you don’t count the roadster (which I think it is correct not to do).
The comment you're replying to is saying that in fair markets, BYD is taking market share away from Toyota even without the proven track record of reliability. Saying "But I wouldn't buy a BYD unless I knew it was reliable" is kind of missing the point.
Toyota and Honda have competitors that are pretty interchangeable, like each other.
> Toyota and Honda have competitors that are pretty interchangeable, like each other.
Do any of these competitors build "machines that can last" as much as Toyota and Honda? Does any other manufacturer have a longevity reputation of either of these two? What are the depreciation schedules of competitors (AIUI, T/H hold their value pretty well)?
Toyota and Honda have each other as direct competitors. If one of them sacrifices reliability, it's over. There are also second tier ones like Nissan making interchangeable cars, so if say Toyota stoops to Nissan's level, then they have to start selling at Nissan prices.
I would also say Ford, but their reputation for reliability applies only to their trucks.
When Ford and Mazda were working together they had some pretty reliable cars. My Focus outlasted two Hondas that I owned. The Hondas were "nicer" cars in terms of features and interior but mechanically the Ford kicked their asses.
Yeah, there was an era of good Focuses, also the Crown Vic. Crown Vic is probably their only car a random person will see and assume it's reliable, in the US at least.
Funny that Honda's hybrids seem to be licensing Toyota's eCVT magic, so it's quite a bit like Apple and Samsung, where they would be filling each other's pockets while also being at each other's throat.
Honda's hybrids are their own thing. They're mostly-series hybrids with one or two direct-drive gears for cruising speeds, as opposed to Toyota's parallel hybrid system.
wdym? Honda's hyrid technology is very different from what Toyota has architecturally
In South Africa Toyotas (Hilux in particular) get stolen all the time because they are so reliable (and you get parts throughout Africa). So then you end up making new sales when people replace their stolen cars. One way to get around the problem for them I guess? /s :)
This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.
Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.
I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.
We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips
Problem? Aren't they selling like cake because of how good their MacBooks are? Other companies aren't that good and I imagine they don't sell as many laptops as Apple does.
Lenovo still sells over double the amount of laptops. 48.5 million to 23.5 million for Apple.
> 48.5 million to 23.5 million for Apple.
Curious to know how many of these sales are 'corporate purchases' for fleets versus 'personal purchases'. Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product? How many have Lenovo/PC IT-managed work machines and also (choose to) purchase a PC for personal use versus choosing an Apple?
> Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product?
I certainly would, because I demand Linux on all my computers. I can't stand the idea of being forced to sacrifice x% of my disk for things like "Apple Intelligence" or other bloatware that Apple decided I can't remove because it is a "system component." That, plus all the privacy and user control issues posed by an operating system effectively remotely controlled by a third party.
But everyone loves Bono?
I feel apple is huge mostly in the US, rest of the world apple has a reputation for being overpriced so people have mostly never used a Mac and if you have a lifetime of windows usage switching is jarring.. speaking from experience
Anectodal, but I use a Lenovo Thinkpad on a personal capacity, and a MacBook at work (so that was the "corporate purchase")
Given a choice, I would rather have the Thinkpad at work as well.
Surprised. I thought Apple would sell more, specially in USA, where the price is not that high because of the purchasing power
Apple might be the top laptop seller in the US, not sure. There are more people using Windows, even in the US.
50% of consumer spending is by the top 10% of consumers, with that 10% generally being Apple ecosystem people. Anyone with ecommmerce stats can confirm this, Apple consumers just shop and consume more, particularly at the high end.
This gives the impression that Apple are even bigger than they are.
I got the M4 mini and then bought a refurbished M1 MacBook air so I could ssh/remote desktop into my mini from the couch. Love that MacBook Air, cost like 200 bucks and is super-fast.
Similar setup to mine, I like to use my MBA as a thin client, but I connect to a normal PC with Linux.
Yeah, my M1 mini with 16GB is great as a daily driver even on Golden Gate. Noticed some slowness recently indexing a huge mail archive, but otherwise I don't even really notice slowdowns.
+1100€ for the 2TB upgrade nowadays, thats not an "Apple tax" anymore thats just straight up robbery. Even a pcie gen5 nvme costs only about 300€, even with todays prices, so 600€ would be quite in line with Apple pricing, but 1100€!? Thats just being a dick.
Ranking SSDs by random-access performance, where Apple’s costly storage has typically excelled, shows prices ranging from 300-600 USD with cheap and costly outliers; the third-best drive is $360 USD, but the second-best at $450 has IIRC uniquely better thermals among highest-performance SSDs and so can be used at full speed in compact systems like a Mac Mini. That’s perhaps 390€, which is only a 2.8X price multiplier, rather than the 3.6X perceived if only comparing with high-heat, low-cost drives — but, in the live euro market, to the best that I can tell from overseas, this drive is only available at 450-500€, suggesting that in a direct comparison on the open market, Apple is only selling at a 2.4X-2.2X multiplier rather than at 3.6X as claimed.
I have no position on whether this ought to materially alter the outrage, but the point about low-heat components tends to get lost when comparing PC parts and Mac parts, so duly noted.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm...
I hate to be that guy, but computer prices, even Apple machines, are still so cheap.
My first 'modern' Mac was the 13" 2010 MacBook Pro, and it was $1299. The current Air is $1299. Inflation be damned.
Let's not even go back in time and look at what the PowerBook G4 or PowerBook 5300c cost...
Would love to see them put out a Mac mini Neo to line up with the laptop now that the Mac Mini is becoming a more performant, expensive device.
Those L1 cache specs have to be wrong, right? Bigger L1 on the e core than p core seems like it has to be incorrect (unless the lower clock lets them get away with something?)
The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.
I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.
$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.
> it won't have unified memory
Why wouldn't you choose unified memory if it matters to you ? A central point of Windows/linux is to get the hardware you want.
You can game just fine with a modern iGPU these days, depending on what you play. You don't always need VRAM.
I'm pretty darn happy with video games on my Mac. It can play the only two video games that I play: World of Warcraft and Baldur's Gate.
> I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
For me, the advantage is not being on Windows or Linux. If my PopOS/Manjaro setups hadn't introduced so many random issues with WoW on raid nights that it became a meme for my raid team, I might still be on Linux.
did you consider the depreciation of your windows machine? A mac is easy to re-sell.
In the future we will all have screens only and a internet connection.
We'll stream everything, so "computers" will exist in the cloud and users won't have to worry about upgrading their machines.
They'll just pay a monthly fee like for mobile data or whatever, and you just connect via screen.
All these data centers and shit around it (internet, etc.) will be actually useful to every day consumers.
Why should I have to upgrade my GPU every 2-3 years? I should just be able to pay to get 4k streaming top of the line graphics.
And <25ms ping latency will become a human right. Only back water countries will see their people having to suffer loading screens and 150ms+ ping
/s btw (in case you're oblivious or something)
Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.
I’m going to keep an eye out for the incoming refurb $200 M4s. Handy little machines to have as a low power tmux terminal.
You'll be looking for a while, looks like they're going for $600-700 used currently. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $350 though. Macs don't depreciate nearly as quickly as PCs do.
The M6 and M5 haven’t shipped tet, just preorder stage so they’ll come down once the nee one’s land. A good proxy is the M2 mini dropping to ~$250 after the M4 hit.
Eg. https://uptradeit.com/buy-used-refurbished-mac-mini-2024-sil... ($269)
I’m hopeful for even lower than $300 prices just because there’s a lot of homelab people spending a lot on these and the M5 ultra really does make the M4 not worth using for that use case. So there should be a flood shortly hopefully.
You seem to just be extrapolating based on old information and bad comparisons. Click through the $269 link. The M2 listing redirects to an Intel Mac mini model.
Apple trade-in value is currently $565 for the base 16GB/256GB M4 mini. (up from $480 a couple weeks ago)
https://i.imgur.com/9qgKSZd.png
I paid $500 for it. Why would I sell it to you for $300?
> A good proxy is the M2 mini dropping to ~$250 after the M4 hit.
That's really not a good proxy, as the base price of EVERYTHING was way lower in 2024. Heck, that M2 mini you're referring to is selling for more than $250 today.
The link you're sharing is a scam - the $269 "2024 M2" takes you to a $269 2014 Intel Core i5 turd.
$269 doesn't even buy you an M1
On the price hikes on RAM and everything else we're still looking for the guys that did this...