Why are Windows PCs pretty much as expensive as Macs these days?

[throAU]

2010 base mac pro - $2899

2023 base mac pro - $6999

The 2023 Mac Pro is so niche as to be almost pointless for 99% of users in 2023. Its an outlier.

There's very few workloads that demand it now, even an M4 base can now do multiple streams of 4k editing in real time.

In 2010, you needed a Mac Pro to do a lot more of the typical higher end Mac user tasks.

The price of the Mac Pro reflects this - its much higher up the performance tree than it was before, even a baseline model, and the low end has caught up to where you'd previously need something Pro level.

 

[throAU]

You're looking in the wrong places.

Laptop Deals | Shop the Latest Offers

Save big on the perfect laptop with Dell's Back to School sale on Inspiron, XPS & Dell Plus. Shop now & get the power & performance you need.

www.dell.com

As of today, they have a AMD Ryzen 3 with 8 GB LPDDR5 and a 512 GB SSD for $279.99.

When the entire machine is only maybe 1.5-2x the price of a decent mechanical keyboard or decent mouse, you just know what the user experience is going to be like!

 

[maflynn]

Because Windows PCs are far more powerful than MacBooks, have same build quality and last just as long.

Are they?
Here we have a M4 Max MBP, vs. a top of the line Razer and the MBP just mops the floor with the razer, as title states, its not even close

 

[iHorseHead]

When the entire machine is only maybe 1.5-2x the price of a decent mechanical keyboard or decent mouse, you just know what the user experience is going to be like!

I feel like those Dell 15 laptops honestly are just Microsoft Office machines.
To do your homework and powerpoint presentation. For example nursing etc students.

 

[jakey rolling]

I feel like those Dell 15 laptops honestly are just Microsoft Office machines.
To do your homework and powerpoint presentation. For example nursing etc students.

So.. merely suitable enough for running the most commonly-used software suite in the world and doing the work that the vast majority of the computer-using public does.

 

[throAU]

So.. merely suitable enough for running the most commonly-used software suite in the world and doing the work that the vast majority of the computer-using public does.

... with a really crappy display, crappy keyboard, unusable trackpad, crap battery life, crap wifi performance, crap GPU and slow CPU. May as well buy a desktop NUC.

CAN I dig holes with a spoon? Sure but shovels and mechanised earthmoving equipment is much better at the job if the money is justified.

You get what you pay for. Pay closer to zero dollars you get progressively less whoever the vendor is. Dell and HP make great high end machines just like Apple (assuming you can deal with Windows or Linux). They also compete at the ultra trash tier of the market and apple simply does not.

Unless your time and aggravation is worth literally zero dollars, trying to get a modern job done with some pile of trash machine with unusable peripherals and slow performance is false economy.

If having a machine double the cost will net me 300 dollars worth of additional productivity and keep me sane over the 3 years projected ownership (... so like... 3 hours or so; and a piece of trash like that would have me cursing at it, having issues with the keyboard or the trackpad accuracy, or waiting for it for several hours per month), the more expensive machine will pay for itself.

 

[maflynn]

So.. merely suitable enough for running the most commonly-used software suite in the world and doing the work that the vast majority of the computer-using public does.

I bought my daughter a dell inspiron, for college last year, and being a prior owner of dells, both xps and inspirons I was shocked at how cheap the entire thing felt, and we ran into. problems with the laptop almost immediately. What was once a well built, quality product is now just ewaste after a year or two.

I also bought a Thinkpad T14s, over the winter, and she can use that instead of the dell, the quality construction and components are night and day. Thinkpads have a great reputation and my laptop affirms all of the positive things people say at how great they are.

 

[pshufd]

I bought my daughter a dell inspiron, for college last year, and being a prior owner of dells, both xps and inspirons I was shocked at how cheap the entire thing felt, and we ran into. problems with the laptop almost immediately. What was once a well built, quality product is now just ewaste after a year or two.

I also bought a Thinkpad T14s, over the winter, and she can use that instead of the dell, the quality construction and components are night and day. Thinkpads have a great reputation and my laptop affirms all of the positive things people say at how great they are.

It feels like Dell has split the XPS line into crap and good stuff, at least on appearance. I didn't try them out because of a thread on them in the past (I was looking at Asus and Lenovo), but I had a Dell XPS from 2008 and it was a great laptop for back then in terms of build quality. I think that Dell has screwed the reputation of the line with what they have done.

 

[maflynn]

It feels like Dell has split the XPS line into crap and good stuff

i wasn't expecting much from the inspiron as they are the lower tier product line. I'm hoping and praying it will last the semester, one or two of her usb ports has already failed. All of the software and her work on it, so she's not willing to. change over to the thinkpad yet, though I've been pushing that. At the very leasts I want her to backup her stuff, just to be safe.

 

[diamond.g]

i wasn't expecting much from the inspiron as they are the lower tier product line. I'm hoping and praying it will last the semester, one or two of her usb ports has already failed. All of the software and her work on it, so she's not willing to. change over to the thinkpad yet, though I've been pushing that. At the very leasts I want her to backup her stuff, just to be safe.

Yeah, Dell has way too many product lines. I guess I am still somewhat bitter they bought Alienware, even though they had XPS as their gaming line at the time.

 

[maflynn]

I guess I am still somewhat bitter they bought Alienware,

No question, they had promised to keep it a separate entity only to force them to use their proprietary motherboards, and power supplies. I think the coolers have been proprietary as well.

 

[pshufd]

i wasn't expecting much from the inspiron as they are the lower tier product line. I'm hoping and praying it will last the semester, one or two of her usb ports has already failed. All of the software and her work on it, so she's not willing to. change over to the thinkpad yet, though I've been pushing that. At the very leasts I want her to backup her stuff, just to be safe.

In the old days, it was the Inspiron for consumer and Lattitude for business. The Inspiron had the latest processors and tech while the Lattitude was usually a generation behind. They often shared common components. One of the differences was that you could get repairs and parts for the Lattitude line for a very long time. I have an Inspiron in the basement and it's built like a tank at 6 pounds.

The XPS line was great. I still have an XPS Studio that I bought in 2008. It has 48 GB of RAM in it which was a lot of RAM back then. I used it for a while in the office and it ran Oracle Enterprise Linux. I used it for development as our cloud development servers were underconfigured and it was nice to have a machine in my office in case the network or cloud datacenter had problems.

I thought highly about the line until around 2014-2015 when I started to hear bad things about their laptops and desktops. I think that you can buy good hardware at Dell but you have to be choosy.

 

[pshufd]

No question, they had promised to keep it a separate entity only to force them to use their proprietary motherboards, and power supplies. I think the coolers have been proprietary as well.

These days, if a company wants to get me interested in their PC parts, advertise on Gamer's Nexus as they vet the stuff that they do ads for.

 

[maflynn]

These days, if a company wants to get me interested in their PC parts, advertise on Gamer's Nexus as they vet the stuff that they do ads for.

GN sets the bar high to be sure, most prebuilts fail to impress him

 

[thejadedmonkey]

My XPS 13 from ~2014 was built like a tank. The first part to go on it, that wasn't due to me being harsh or my kid coating it with lollipop, was actually the palm rests! The soft black plastic has turned sticky in its old age, and I'm actually in the process of putting some vinyl over it so I can continue using it in the garage for Spotify and some hobby programs.

 

[throAU]

In terms of DELL, Inspiron have always been pretty cheaply made, if you wanted something nice either XPS or latitude. no idea what they call their stuff now though.

 

[diamond.g]

GN sets the bar high to be sure, most prebuilts fail to impress him

I wonder if Velocity Micro has been looked at by GN. They are smaller than Falcon Northwest but also build boutique PC's.

 

[NewOldStock]

This is just like the news , arguing for the sake of arguing.
MINES BIGGER!

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Are they?
Here we have a M4 Max MBP, vs. a top of the line Razer and the MBP just mops the floor with the razer, as title states, its not even close

That's a gaming laptop, and the reviewer didn't bother benchmarking games.

It has an Nvidia 4090 and a screen with a 440mhz refresh rate. The power brick is able to power the laptop while gaming, while also charging it. The use case is so different from the MacBook Pro it isn't even close.

I'm not sure what a good MBP comparison would be, but it isn't the Razer.

 

[maflynn]

That's a gaming laptop, and the reviewer didn't bother benchmarking games.

Yes, its a gaming laptop, and perhaps you're unaware but LLMs use GPUs, that's why he had focused some time on the task manager showing that the LLMs are actually running on the 4090

It has an Nvidia 4090 and a screen with a 440mhz refresh rate. The power brick is able to power the laptop while gaming, while also charging it. The use case is so different from the MacBook Pro it isn't even close.

The large power brick is needed due to the huge power draw of the 4090, that's his point, while on battery, the laptop runs on the igpu.

I'm not sure what a good MBP comparison would be, but it isn't the Razer.

The comparison is being made because of how popular high end nvidia cards are for LLMs, and so for tasks that need/rely on cuda cores, this is a very good comparison.

This is why nvidia is exceeded apple in its valuation, their data center GPUs are being used for LLMS and so everyone who's jumping on the AI bandwagon is buying nvidia products. For those people who don't own a data center, they need to consider what computer best allows them to work on AI, and the conventional wisdom is to use a computer with a high end nvidia gpu like the 4090 (though the razer us using the mobile version of the 4090)

Finally this is one of the highest spec'd laptops, in terms of cpu, gpu and ram, and for LLM based workflows, it did not beat out the Mac. If you think this was a poor comparison, please let me know of a laptop that is a better comparson and we can discuss

Why do you think a gaming laptop is not a good comparison, especially when its running high end cpu/gpu?

Edit: let me just add/clarify that gaming laptops are generally the most powerful/fastest built windows laptops outside of dedicated/specific workstation type laptops. Just because they have the word gaming in front of their title in no way invalidates the raw performance that are capable of (at a price, in dollars and heat).

 

[diamond.g]

Yes, its a gaming laptop, and perhaps you're unaware but LLMs use GPUs, that's why he had focused some time on the task manager showing that the LLMs are actually running on the 4090


The large power brick is needed due to the huge power draw of the 4090, that's his point, while on battery, the laptop runs on the igpu.


The comparison is being made because of how popular high end nvidia cards are for LLMs, and so for tasks that need/rely on cuda cores, this is a very good comparison.

This is why nvidia is exceeded apple in its valuation, their data center GPUs are being used for LLMS and so everyone who's jumping on the AI bandwagon is buying nvidia products. For those people who don't own a data center, they need to consider what computer best allows them to work on AI, and the conventional wisdom is to use a computer with a high end nvidia gpu like the 4090 (though the razer us using the mobile version of the 4090)

Finally this is one of the highest spec'd laptops, in terms of cpu, gpu and ram, and for LLM based workflows, it did not beat out the Mac. If you think this was a poor comparison, please let me know of a laptop that is a better comparson and we can discuss

Why do you think a gaming laptop is not a good comparison, especially when its running high end cpu/gpu?

Edit: let me just add/clarify that gaming laptops are generally the most powerful/fastest built windows laptops outside of dedicated/specific workstation type laptops. Just because they have the word gaming in front of their title in no way invalidates the raw performance that are capable of (at a price, in dollars and heat).

I am not aware of any gaming laptops that are designed to run full tilt on battery. I think macOS users tend to be surprised that the Windows systems limit themselves when on battery (or at least it appears that way when you look at comparison videos).

 

[maflynn]

I am not aware of any gaming laptops that are designed to run full tilt on battery.

No question and the YTer mentions this, he did do some benchmarks on battery but then on the mains - He was showing one of the advantages that Apple Silicon has over laptops that use discrete GPUs - the ability to run at the same speed on and off battery.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Yes, its a gaming laptop, and perhaps you're unaware but LLMs use GPUs, that's why he had focused some time on the task manager showing that the LLMs are actually running on the 4090

Gaming is different from LLM though. Gaming doesn't require the insane amount of RAM that an LLM requires, and has other requirements instead. Such as RGB leds (lol) and a faster refresh rate on the screen. Likewise, fan noise is probably irrelevant because I've never known anyone to game without any sound from speakers or headphones.

He's testing the 16gb 4090 against the m4 max with 40gb of RAM.

The current high end razer blade 18 is a 24gb 5090, with 64gb of system RAM.

I'm not sure that any laptop is going to beat the MBP in terms of LLM use, but to pit a laptop specifically designed around gaming against a laptop that is basically configured specifically for LLM use, and then go "oh my, the gaming laptop sucks at LLM use, and I won't test the MBP for gaming" is... disengenuous at best.

Off the top of my head, I'd be willing to bet that the Razer stays charged while gaming, can be charged while gaming, has a better screen refresh rate, has a better framerates while gaming, and has the vastly superior keyboard for gaming. The review didn't touch on any of that at all. Nor did they point out that the Blade isn't on any list for best laptops for LLM use, so it's not even expected to be the best.

But you know what laptop does make the list for best gaming laptops? The Razer Blade.

 

[JSRinUK]

I bought my daughter a dell inspiron, for college last year, and being a prior owner of dells, both xps and inspirons I was shocked at how cheap the entire thing felt, and we ran into. problems with the laptop almost immediately. What was once a well built, quality product is now just ewaste after a year or two.

I bought an Inspiron 7500 back in 1999/2000 (I think). I still have it, and it still works. Batteries are dead, though (even the spare I barely used). It has a broken screen hinge (I think it got too hot), so it’s been sat on the side, lid open, for an awfully long time now. Despite being moved around a bit (you can see the screen cable), it still fires up and works.

The screen was pretty hires at the time, too, with small bezels.

I don’t think I’d buy Dell these days, though.

 

[salamanderjuice]

Gaming is different from LLM though. Gaming doesn't require the insane amount of RAM that an LLM requires, and has other requirements instead. Such as RGB leds (lol) and a faster refresh rate on the screen. Likewise, fan noise is probably irrelevant because I've never known anyone to game without any sound from speakers or headphones.

He's testing the 16gb 4090 against the m4 max with 40gb of RAM.

The current high end razer blade 18 is a 24gb 5090, with 64gb of system RAM.

I'm not sure that any laptop is going to beat the MBP in terms of LLM use, but to pit a laptop specifically designed around gaming against a laptop that is basically configured specifically for LLM use, and then go "oh my, the gaming laptop sucks at LLM use, and I won't test the MBP for gaming" is... disengenuous at best.

Off the top of my head, I'd be willing to bet that the Razer stays charged while gaming, can be charged while gaming, has a better screen refresh rate, has a better framerates while gaming, and has the vastly superior keyboard for gaming. The review didn't touch on any of that at all. Nor did they point out that the Blade isn't on any list for best laptops for LLM use, so it's not even expected to be the best.

But you know what laptop does make the list for best gaming laptops? The Razer Blade.

It's not even like it's really worse at those LLMs. It WAS faster in the Ollama test too by a good margin. Hard to say why it didn't do as well in LM studio. Could be a config or model issue there.

And yes, no doubt the Razer would crush the MBP at CP2077, other gaming tasks and tasks requiring the GPUs 3D performance.