Apple does not compete well with cheap laptops that's for sure. But its laptops are very competitively priced with other expensive laptops. For example, I do not think you can get a retina quality display 13 inch display, 128SSD, and 4 GB ram for under $1299 from other manufacturers.
I haven't done a direct comparison, but I don't think they're even in the same league pricing wise. They do have some unique features, like the Retina display, but even given that, I think they've priced themselves out of the market. They are creeping up in price while the rest of the industry bottomed out. I'm glad I have my early 2011 MBP with it's upgradable storage, but I don't know what I'll get next time around. $3k for a laptop with that limited storage is a really, really hard sell.
They may price out a few people, but the higher margin on each product makes up for the discrepancy in terms of the bottom line. Basically, Apple could care less if you can't afford their product, because their are plenty of people that can, and the higher price those people pay more than makes up for the lack of your business.
I'm just thinking they are going to drive their volume way down. The key issue I see is lack of hard drives to offer a decent amount of storage space. Most of these machines are going to be highly dependent on external hard drives. Some of them come with as little as 128GB of space. Seriously? I think my iTunes library alone is bigger than that. And I definitely have more pictures than 128GB.
It's not hard at all to test your hypothesis. Simply look at current/upcoming sales data and revenue numbers along with market share percentage to see if Apple has indeed priced themselves out of the game. I have a hunch your findings may in fact surprise you.
I think they've priced themselves right out of the market, especially at a time when fewer and fewer users are really using desktop/laptop machines for a lot.
Users can't put their own SSD in, they need to buy Apple's, but you're probably used to that as a Mac owner anyway. Can't buy my displayport to HDMI cable in the store, I need to buy it from Apple.
The external adapters are all on Monoprice for like $12. But for the SSDs, they should be using the industry standard 2.5" and 5.25" drive bays. The Early 2011 MBP has them, I have a 500GB SSD and a 640GB hard drive (eventually will be upgraded to 1.5TB). You can't do that on the new ones.
Only an insane person buys a laptop with a hard drive these days!
Only an insane person would
boot off a hard drive. My laptop has one of each, so that I get the best of both worlds.
Ah....no.
Contrary to popular belief on this forum, there are plenty of people who value storage space over speed.
Yup. I think the solution for now is to have two drives in there. I wish laptop manufacturers would actually embrace that. There is no need to store RAW files and MP4 files on an SSD that's capable of some absurdly high amount of IOPS. The dual drive concept seems foreign on laptops, even though it's common on desktops. Even a 2.5" HDD bay with an eSATA or PCI-E SSD would be a decent combo.
Both actually - storage has moved off the main platform. There's networked NAS, USB3, TB2, etc for larger storage.
Get all that junk off your main drive. The world has changed, stop living back in 2003.
What if I want everything with me when I travel? Charging devices already creates enough of a pile of spaghetti next to my machine, I don't need more crap and then worry about how the external drives are handled as I'm cramming and slamming my backpack onto some crummy Delta jet that has about 1/4 the carry on capacity it should.
That doesn't work too well for photography-- RAW files take up a lot of room.
It doesn't sound like a great idea to cart around an external device just to access my Lightroom data.
I don't need the whole collection on the laptop at once but doing so would be difficult with the metadata/tags/etc. There's still a lot of work to do with applications to get to that point.
I also use virtual machines. Those don't run too well from a NAS.
Eventually SSDs will get to the point where I can afford a new Macbook Pro with 1TB storage but that's a few years away. I don't really want to spend more than $2000 for a laptop.
Yup, exactly. I'm actually shocked that we haven't seen more capacity development on the laptop side, but rather laptops that seem to hold
less, just as people's collections of data are growing at an ever increasing rate.
If you're using it for serious work, having an SSD will save you so much time instead of waiting on slow HDDs. Penny wise, pound foolish. The wasted productivity by you not having a large enough SSD for your work and relying on a much slower HDD is a productivity killer.
So I think you're being a bit foolish by not paying the extra here - if this is your bread and butter.
You need space to store stuff too. Which is why I advocate the dual drive model.
----------
Sorry I couldn't respond to every post, worked a 14 hour day.
