Now that Macs have Apple silicon, do you think they are fairly priced?

[theorist9]

No, but there's a thing called gouging and Apple does that with storage and ram.

Storage:
Samsung 2 TB 990 EVO Plus 119,
Samsung 2 TB 990 PRO SSD: 159
Apple 2 TB storage on a Studio: 600 dollars

Ram:
G.SKILL Trident Z 64GB DDR4: 169
CORSAIR VENGEANCE 64GB DDR4 86
Apple 64GB on a Studio 700. (400 for the ram, but you need to upgrade the CPU for 300)

Yes, Apple is not a charity, but up-selling storage 500% of what samsung charges for the EVO Plus does qualify as excessive.

Also consider what you're getting with the apple ssd, it does not include the controller that's built into the SoC, you're only getting the Nands, so the price variance is even larger.

Seriously? I thought it was pretty obvious my post was entirely facetious—I was poking fun at Apple for their storage upcharges, not defending them. I'm suprised you took it literally. I mean, come on, I had Tim growing his own vegetables so he'd have enough to eat.

I was thinking of adding an "/s" at the end to indicate its nature, but I really didn't think that was needed.

 

[maflynn]

Seriously? I thought it was pretty obvious my post was entirely facetious—I was poking fun at Apple for their storage upcharges, not defending them. I'm suprised you took it literally. I mean, come on, I had Tim growing his own vegetables so he'd have enough to eat.

I was thinking of adding an "/s" at the end to indicate its nature, but I really didn't think that was needed.

The issue is people do defend the pricing and there’s no way for anyone to discern sarcasm. That’s why we have the /s

 

[Happy_John]

The issue is people do defend the pricing and there’s no way for anyone to discern sarcasm. That’s why we have the /s

Some people might defend it (for whatever reason they have to do so), but very few.

Understanding their “upsell” system isn’t the same as agreeing with it.

F you understand it, then at least to can mitigate some of pain of overspend.

The base offerings at the low end of Apple’s stuff, the MBA, Mac Mini, even the base iPad, are good value, all things considered, for what you get compared to the equivalent from a competitor.

It’s the upgrades where Apple has a ridiculous profit margin.

So never go above an entry level machine unless you have a use case that needs the upgrade.

If you need to upgrade the base machine, have a look at the entry level if the next tier: ie - it makes a lot more sense to buy a entry-level Mac Studio than a maxed out Mac mini.

That’s not agreeing with their charging structure, it’s trying to limit the damage from it.

 

[maflynn]

it makes a lot of sense to buy a entry-level Mac Studio than a maxed out Mac mini.

That's what I did, the base model studio is many upsides over an upgraded mini, not just the pricing.

 

[Project Alice]

They're fairly priced except the storage and RAM.

 

[Populus]

If you need to upgrade the base machine, have a look at the entry level if the next tier: ie - it makes a lot more sense to buy a entry-level Mac Studio than a maxed out Mac mini.

In my case, unfortunately, Apple wins: I need a Mac mini but for it’s light weight and ultra compact size, so I can easily put it in my suitcase without adding too much weight.

And I do need more than the base 256GB and 16GB of RAM. So I’m forced to spend circa 650€ in upgrades. Which is a bit abusive.

You will tell me: “get a base Mac Studio” but even if I was willing to spend 2.500€ on one, it’s just not an option for me. It’s way too heavy and bulky to travel around with it, and the mini fulfills that role perfectly. For maybe 1.200 to 1.500€.

 

[Happy_John]

In my case, unfortunately, Apple wins: I need a Mac mini but for it’s light weight and ultra compact size, so I can easily put it in my suitcase without adding too much weight.

And I do need more than the base 256GB and 16GB of RAM. So I’m forced to spend circa 650€ in upgrades. Which is a bit abusive.

You will tell me: “get a base Mac Studio” but even if I was willing to spend 2.500€ on one, it’s just not an option for me. It’s way too heavy and bulky to travel around with it, and the mini fulfills that role perfectly. For maybe 1.200 to 1.500€.

Well, that’s why I talk about use cases You have a specific set on requirements for your use case, so get a machine that fits those requirements, rather than “bigger numbers sound cooler”.

I’m saying buy the least upgraded machine that matches your use case.

I’m just non-plussed by people buying a MBP with an M4 max as a flex when they’re primarily using office, email and a Webbrowser. Just get a MBA, save themselves some money, they’re not going to be taking advantage of the higher spec.

People wincing at the cost of maxed out Mac’s do need to ask, do I really need those upgrades? Or am I just getting sucked into playing fantasy football with the specs?

 

[Heat_Fan89]

I always buy the cheapest Mac which is the base Mini and from the education store. I cry less when it's no longer supported. Looking forward to the M5 Mini, hopefully next year.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Fairly priced compared to what metric? If the question revolves around other Windows based products, I would guess it probably isn't across the board. That being said, it really comes down to model and user need / preference quotient.

 

[theluggage]

People wincing at the cost of maxed out Mac’s do need to ask, do I really need those upgrades? Or am I just getting sucked into playing fantasy football with the specs?

There's a difference between "maxed out" and sensible minimum RAM and SSD sizes for a $600 desktop or $1000 laptop.

Spec up a PC from components and it doesn't really make sense to fit less than 32GB/1TB. Going for 16GB/256GB might save you $100 - if you can find a 256GB SSD stick! On a $600 Mac Mini, it halves the price... You see lots of people on these forums agonising over whether to get the base model or pay for more RAM or SSD - when getting maybe twice the amount of RAM and SSD you currently need should be an inexpensive no-brainer in 2025 when 32GB/1TB on any other platform is not some outrageous, serious-callers-only spec.

I think Apple's problem is that even the base the M4 is qute capable of "content creation" work and overkill for "personal productivity" use, so they're using RAM and SSD to knobble their entry level system.

It's particularly obvious with the Mini where the only difference between the "good/better/best" models - covering a $600-$1000 price range - is the RAM and SSD sizes. They could charge whatever they wanted for the difference between Mx, Mx Pro and Mx Max chips since those are distinctive products - but it's not hard to work out that they're charging $400 for $100 worth of commodity RAM and SSD.

I think it would make more sense if, come the M5 launch, they start using A-series processors for cheaper entry-level machines and have the M-series starting at 32GB/1TB which is a more sensible spec for such a powerful processor.

 

[AdamBuker]

That's a different question. Does the AFP client work on Tahoe?

Unfortunately I have not had any luck with connecting to my PowerMac G5 over AFP or SMB1 from Tahoe. I am going to try Netatalk and see if that works for setting up an AFP file service from my M1 MacMini. You can also try using FTP with a Cyberduck client though it’s not as convenient. In my case I have been using an external drive to shuttle files back and forth.

 

[zach-coleman]

The base models are such a good value at this point that unless you absolutely require some windows only software (ex games) I think that windows laptops are barely even competitive at the moment. If you need more ram/storage this edge goes away fast.

As far as the iMac, I haven’t seen a product that comes even close to being competitive. I was once linked one that came out in 2024 and still had a 1080p screen in a similar price range.

 

[Ctrlos]

Given you can expect a decade of use out of a Mac I’d say that they’re great value for money.

 

[cjsuk]

Fairly priced is very subjective.

If you're earning $150k+ they're all fairly priced to you and you'll spend on a high end MBP and shrug when everyone tells you that they are too expensive.

If you're earning $30k the bottom end is probably not fairly priced to you and you'll buy a cheap PC and lament the pricing of Apple.

However value is the real thing to consider. That transcends both which is a matter of how much you gain from it and the lifetime of it. At the bottom end, paying $1000 for an MBA is probably a better investment than a $500 PC junker because you have to replace it less.

 

[Bodhitree]

Agreed, once you take into account the pricing of the upgrades the ‘fair price’ argument quickly goes away. When I bought my M1 iMac I bought a 16/512 configuration, which I thought struck a balance between future proofing and cost. It means the machine still cost just over 2000€, and then I use a 2 TB Samsung external SSD for bulk storage to cut costs.

The thing is 2000€ spent on a PC would get me a very decent enthusiast machine, but it would come in a big bulky tower case, run hot, and come with Windows. The Mac is slim, quiet, cool, beautiful and pretty darn fast, so I still consider it good value.

 

[maflynn]

The thing is 2000€ spent on a PC would get me a very decent enthusiast machine, but it would come in a big bulky tower case, run hot, and come with Windows. The Mac is slim, quiet, cool, beautiful and pretty darn fast, so I still consider it good value.

If you build your PC, then you can have as small of a case as you want and 2000 dollars will go a lot farther, though GPUs are insanely priced. As for heat, the GPU is both a PCs biggest advantage and disadvantage, Nvidia 50 series GPUs, consume large amounts of power, generate too much heat and requires more cooling then a few generations ago.

My Studio has exactly the advantages you mention, its smaller, quieter and cooler then my mid range PC. The biggest advantage my PC has, is that I can upgrade the ram, storage, even the cpu but its largely powered off as my studio has taken over as my primary machine

 

[AussieStu]

My first Mac was a PowerMac 9500/120, it was a beast of a tower. Nowadays you get cool, quiet, small machines that are many times faster. Computing has come a long way.

A brand new Mac is never a small purchase, but it’s worth it.

Did you ever consider going for a PowerComputer (Mac Clone) back in the day?

 

[cjsuk]

Agreed, once you take into account the pricing of the upgrades the ‘fair price’ argument quickly goes away. When I bought my M1 iMac I bought a 16/512 configuration, which I thought struck a balance between future proofing and cost. It means the machine still cost just over 2000€, and then I use a 2 TB Samsung external SSD for bulk storage to cut costs.

The thing is 2000€ spent on a PC would get me a very decent enthusiast machine, but it would come in a big bulky tower case, run hot, and come with Windows. The Mac is slim, quiet, cool, beautiful and pretty darn fast, so I still consider it good value.

Worth adding power usage in there.

My PC (9700X/32Gb/2TB/RTX5060Ti) will cost me £750 in electricity over 5 years.

The M4 Pro MBP £95.

 

[throAU]

If you build your PC, then you can have as small of a case as you want and 2000 dollars will go a lot farther, though GPUs are insanely priced. As for heat, the GPU is both a PCs biggest advantage and disadvantage, Nvidia 50 series GPUs, consume large amounts of power, generate too much heat and requires more cooling then a few generations ago.

Thing is, you'd still be running windows and dealing with that complete and utter dumpster fire.

I think far too many people get caught up in hardware spec rather than determining what will do the jobs they need the device to do.

For most home users, a baseline Macbook Air/Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is more than plenty if you're sensible about storing things in the cloud or on an archive drive/NAS. Even if you buy the bottom of the barrel spec, the current lineup is pretty capable for regular non-professional users.

You don't need to go spec-sheet racing against what you can get in a PC for the same/less money because its irrelevant - PCs run different OS and application software.

 

[Happy_John]

Thing is, you'd still be running windows and dealing with that complete and utter dumpster fire.

I think far too many people get caught up in hardware spec rather than determining what will do the jobs they need the device to do.

For most home users, a baseline Macbook Air/Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is more than plenty if you're sensible about storing things in the cloud or on an archive drive/NAS.

You don't need to go spec-sheet racing against what you can get in a PC for the same/less money because its irrelevant - PCs don't run macOS, etc.

Now that 16 GB is the entery level RAM, that is enough the vast majority of end users. Tech review use video editing / rendering as benchmarks, but this given a skewed view: the majorowy of users are not creating and editing 4K.

16gb RAM and 512 Gb storage is very usable outside of performance heavy use-cases, and less users have performance-heavy use cases than marketing and Apple influencer / reviewer community projects.

A home user could live with 256Gb storage, but it means being careful, not enough wiggle room. Above 512 GB is your want it or you need it, but then you’ve moving out of the “reasonably priced” window.

From my experience, upgrading the M chip from a “binned” version to a “full fat” is the least effective way of spending more money on an Apple Silicon MAC. There are gains, but the value to gain ratio is far worse than with storage or RAM.

But only, only upgrade your Mac specs if you need to. Know your actually use cases, rather than “32 GB sounds better than 16Gb”.

 

[maflynn]

Thing is, you'd still be running windows and dealing with that complete and utter dumpster fire.

No question, and with Recall, and seeing advertisements in the OS, its a complete turn off for me. I don't hate Windows, it does some things better then macOS, and conversely macOS does some things better then windows.

For most home users, a baseline Macbook Air/Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is more than plenty if you're sensible about storing things in the cloud or on an archive drive/NAS. Even if you buy the bottom of the barrel spec, the current lineup is pretty capable for regular non-professional users.

If you want to play games, the base line M4 along with the cooling in an MBA or Mini are such that its not up to the task, not by a long shot.

256GB can quickly become constrained, and while there's options like icloud, onedrive, external drives the fact remains apple sells base model computers with drives that are too small.

As for ram, you can make an argument that 16GB should be enough, but whenever I see comments in reddit about buying a MBA, Mini, etc, they say 16GB should be fine for most people unless you have a lot of chrome tabs open. There always seems to be a But when talking about 16GB of ram. Also most people I know (including myself) have dozens of chrome/firefox/safari tabs open, and a crap ton of apps running at once.

My point is that even for home users, the base models can be too constraining, yes on paper the specs are more then enough, but when people actually start using them, I'm not so sure.

 

[Happy_John]

There's a difference between "maxed out" and sensible minimum RAM and SSD sizes for a $600 desktop or $1000 laptop.

Spec up a PC from components and it doesn't really make sense to fit less than 32GB/1TB. Going for 16GB/256GB might save you $100 - if you can find a 256GB SSD stick! On a $600 Mac Mini, it halves the price... You see lots of people on these forums agonising over whether to get the base model or pay for more RAM or SSD - when getting maybe twice the amount of RAM and SSD you currently need should be an inexpensive no-brainer in 2025 when 32GB/1TB on any other platform is not some outrageous, serious-callers-only spec.

I think Apple's problem is that even the base the M4 is qute capable of "content creation" work and overkill for "personal productivity" use, so they're using RAM and SSD to knobble their entry level system.

It's particularly obvious with the Mini where the only difference between the "good/better/best" models - covering a $600-$1000 price range - is the RAM and SSD sizes. They could charge whatever they wanted for the difference between Mx, Mx Pro and Mx Max chips since those are distinctive products - but it's not hard to work out that they're charging $400 for $100 worth of commodity RAM and SSD.

I think it would make more sense if, come the M5 launch, they start using A-series processors for cheaper entry-level machines and have the M-series starting at 32GB/1TB which is a more sensible spec for such a powerful processor.

If you have actual use-cases that need it, then get it. Get what you need. But once you’re doing that, it’s much harder to came the Mac you’re buying is “reasonably priced”.

Ultimately, if you could do all thing things you need to do on a Mac on an iPad Pro ( I’m not saying you would want to, but if you functionally could), then it’s worth double-checking to see if you might be spending more than you need to on a new Mac.

 

[Happy_John]

Worth adding power usage in there.

My PC (9700X/32Gb/2TB/RTX5060Ti) will cost me £750 in electricity over 5 years.

The M4 Pro MBP £95.

Yep. Power consumption is the main reason I don’t use my Mac Pros (5,1 and 6,1) as “main machines” anymore, and use Mac minis as the heart of my desktop ( M2 Pro) and as small servers around my home and office space.

Electricity is expensive where I live. Using less power does make a significant difference to monthly costs.

 

[salamanderjuice]

Thing is, you'd still be running windows and dealing with that complete and utter dumpster fire.

I think far too many people get caught up in hardware spec rather than determining what will do the jobs they need the device to do.

For most home users, a baseline Macbook Air/Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is more than plenty if you're sensible about storing things in the cloud or on an archive drive/NAS. Even if you buy the bottom of the barrel spec, the current lineup is pretty capable for regular non-professional users.

You don't need to go spec-sheet racing against what you can get in a PC for the same/less money because its irrelevant - PCs run different OS and application software.

You don't have to run Windows. Linux is perfectly viable and doesn't try to sell you cloud storage or music subscriptions either. Especially in these days where most people are doing little beyond running a browser.

A baseline Mac Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is almost twice the starting price at $1000 to get 512GB and 24GB RAM. You can get a Beelink or Minisforum mini PC with 32GB RAM, 1TB storage for half that with good enough CPU/GPU performance for most tasks (e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-PCle4-0-Computer-Support-Display/dp/B0DKF15XQJ).

How many people that have a Mac actually need one because there is some software that only runs on Mac? I'd wager it's a tiny minority.

 

[Happy_John]

You don't have to run Windows. Linux is perfectly viable and doesn't try to sell you cloud storage or music subscriptions either. Especially in these days where most people are doing little beyond running a browser.

A baseline Mac Mini with 1 tier up on RAM and storage is almost twice the starting price at $1000 to get 512GB and 24GB RAM. You can get a Beelink or Minisforum mini PC with 32GB RAM, 1TB storage for half that with good enough CPU/GPU performance for most tasks (e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-PCle4-0-Computer-Support-Display/dp/B0DKF15XQJ).

How many people that have a Mac actually need one because there is some software that only runs on Mac? I'd wager it's a tiny minority.

But why do you think people would need to upgrade from 16Gb to. 24 GB RAM in the first place?

For a lot of users, that’s an unnecessary upgrade costing money they don’t need to spend.

Outside of certain use-cases - professional-grade audio/video editing and post-production and heavy number-crunching/compute, the prime reason by far why people spend so much on PC performance is gaming.

This skews the comparison, as gaming is not going to be the priming factor when speccing up a Mac.

While you can play games on a Mac, if gaming is a priority, using a Mac is like updating soup with a fork. Mac is not a good gaming platform, because games developers don’t make it a priority.

So if there’s no need to upgrade the RAM, don’t.