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Why is the 15 inch MacBook Pro so expensive?
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If you can't justify then don't buy it. You shouldn't need external justification. Use your needs/wants/budget.
The Apple premium. It's not something that everyone finds worthwhile or else everyone would be buying Macs. I can give my justifications but they may not be relevant to you. Again, your purchase, your call.
The higher the price, the more people will buy into the mindset of "perceived excellence". It's a decades old marketing ploy.
That can and does play a part in many cases. It had no part in my buying decision. Build quality is certainly better in my experience and the trackpad alone isn't met by the competition. OP needs to make the call for himself. It's like any other product. Not everyone sees the point in buying into a premium brand when a less expensive option exists that meets that person's needs. Different people have different preferences, priorities, budgets, etc. Specs aren't everything for everyone. If I relied solely on specs when car shopping I would have overlooked my current car which has been outstanding.
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Yeah they're pricey, but worth it because they last longer. I have been amazed at how long every Mac I've bought stays useful. I paid $999 for my last laptop, used it for 5 years and then sold it for $250, that's just not possible with Windows machines. Not to mention the generally cheaper software and higher quality, longer lasting associated hardware. We're still using old Airports & Apple TVs and they work great and still look good. That NEVER happened when we were on Windoze back in the day.
If you want to defray some of the price shock, don't buy new from Apple. Either buy used off of CL or buy refurb from Apple. If you go refurb, get the base model of the minimum processor that works for you, upgrade the screen as you see fit from Apple, then add RAM and an SSD aftermarket.
If you want to defray some of the price shock, don't buy new from Apple. Either buy used off of CL or buy refurb from Apple. If you go refurb, get the base model of the minimum processor that works for you, upgrade the screen as you see fit from Apple, then add RAM and an SSD aftermarket.
Buy a retina from macmall and get free shipping and no tax! The savings you could get a retina with a 256 SSD
http://www.macmall.com/p/Apple-MacBook-Pro/product~dpno~9232232~pdp.hgcijcg
Or a refurb from apple
http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC975LL/A
http://www.macmall.com/p/Apple-MacBook-Pro/product~dpno~9232232~pdp.hgcijcg
Or a refurb from apple
http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC975LL/A
So what would be the difference between a fully pimped out 13 inch (2.9 i7) verses a base 15 (2.3 i7)?
Two cores and discrete graphics? So, a heck of a lot?
My only nitpick is that I really don't feel like the 15" cMBP that you have specced out is the "Rolls Royce" of laptops. I'd say it's closer to a BMW or Mercedes Benz.
As it stands I feel like the rMBP would be in the category of the Rolls Royce of mass market laptops.
Anyways, what are you paying for beyond the hardware? The things that several other users have listed.
- Customer Service
- Many retail locations
- The OS and Ecosystem built around it
- The Track Pad. That's right. It's good enough that it receives it's own bullet point.
I agree with the RR analogy.
with the rMBP, it's a closed box that only special mechanics can operate on (no upgradeable ram, lack of useful ports etc).
where as the bmw you can still hack at it with your own tools and upgrade things (still has ethernet, FW ports, user-serviceable ram etc).
YMMV.
with the rMBP, it's a closed box that only special mechanics can operate on (no upgradeable ram, lack of useful ports etc).
where as the bmw you can still hack at it with your own tools and upgrade things (still has ethernet, FW ports, user-serviceable ram etc).
YMMV.
The bottom line is this. Go into an Apple store and use the laptop for a while. Then do the same for the Asus in a PC store. The difference should be abundantly clear. If it isn't then you have your answer.
Talking about disk intensivity of the applications, one must distinguish between demand for transactions from demand for bandwidth. SSDs excel both at transactions/second and bandwidth.Yet the amount of win over mechanical hard drives in both of those differs by orders of magnitude. A typical consumer SSD is, as a ballpark, 3 orders of magnitude faster in transactions/s over a hard drive, and less than 1 order of magnitude faster in bandwidth.
The number of transactions per second is simply the number of non-contiguous reads/writes. This matters for things such as compilation of large code bases (thousands of files), or for video editing where the source material won't fit in the RAM that the OS allocates as the cache. This is where SSDs are a huge (3 orders of magnitude!) win over mechanical HDDs. Otherwise, it's only an incremental improvement.
Do note that all modern OSes, that is OS X, Windows 7&up, and some Linux distributions, have a special on-disk cache or other mechanisms to speed up boot-up and application loading. Those mechanisms lower the transaction demand on the hard drive, allowing full use of mechanical hard drive's bandwidth.
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If one needs a reason to go to retina: for some applications, having higher resolution helps immensely. My anecdote from today follows. Running virtual machines of any sort, especially Windows VMs where the application Uis are designed to pixels, not actual screen size, is helped a lot with higher resolution display. I've just upgraded my trusty 2008 MBP to a 1920x1200 display from 1680x1050 and it's so much easier to stick two Fusion windows and some preview documents all on that one 17" screen.
True, although sometimes VMs can have issues because they aren't "expecting" such a high resolution. I can log into my corporate network from a home PC through Internet Explorer (using Microsoft VirtualPC). However, I tried it from within the VM, and noticed that our network policies cap the render at 1280x800 and don't permit scaling. So although Windows 7 itself runs fine on my 13" rMBP in Parallels, the "virtual" desktop I see our corporate network in renders in tiny text. It works fine in Boot Camp since Windows 7's own scaling kicks in, but Parallels messes with this a bit in its attempt to "retinize" the virtual machine.
I love the way you put it.
RGDS,
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So what would be the difference between a fully pimped out 13 inch (2.9 i7) verses a base 15 (2.3 i7)?
Another thing: The absolute deal-breaker with the 13" cMBP is (for me personally), that it still has the same crappy display resolution as the forst generation macbook (albeit that the lcd has advanced in many other respects).
IMNSHO, "1280X800" and "Pro" should not exist in the same sentence.
RGDS,
This right here is why dropped my money down on my MBP..Also why I will never go back to windoz base machines.
The main reason in my mind to go for a 2012 cMBP over a retina MBP is in order to upgrade it yourself. You can get a Fusion Drive in there for a the cost of a 128GB (or 256GB) SSD and a $10 adapter from Amazon and spend another $70 on a 16GB memory upgrade, and you can have a machine with a 750GB Fusion Drive and 16GB memory for about $200 more.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that SSD and RAM prices are dropping like rocks. That to me is the biggest reason to get the cMBP: both of those are easily affordable and you can stay 'with the curve' on the prices, whereas Apple is still charging an arm and a leg for the extra SSD and RAM on their retinas and Airs. Actually I revise my statement -- Apple's prices for extra SSD and RAM on the 15" rmbp are actually fair. Their prices for the 13" rmbp and Airs are a joke though.
Think about this: to get 256 GB SSD + 4 more GB RAM on the MBA is $400. I was able to buy 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB Samsung 840 SSD for roughly the same price and pop it into my machine.
Think about this: to get 256 GB SSD + 4 more GB RAM on the MBA is $400. I was able to buy 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB Samsung 840 SSD for roughly the same price and pop it into my machine.
I agree. I remedied it (because of how much I like the 13" form factor) by having a 27" Cinema Display, however the 13" MBP resolution is about the same as the 5 or 6 year old PC laptop it replaces. It IS very limiting in many many applications. Yet another important reason to go look at and play with the machine, if you are considering a 13" MBP, sit down and play with it for a while, spend an hour with it the Apple Store won't care. Decide if it's worth it.
I LOVE the 13" form factor, absolutely love it it fits like a glove. But, it comes with some compromises, which is why I played with it first to determine if the resolution was going to be a hamper! And seriously considered the GPU issue too...
ABSOLUTELY
It's insanely cheap to upgrade and it was the reason I didn't even consider the retina model right now. I got two 256GB SSD's, an Opti-Bay, and 16GB of RAM for less than I could upgrade the SSD alone on an rMBP.
The market WILL shift. We no longer install 2D accelerator cards or upgrade our sound cards, because the integrated stuff is more than adequate. Eventually, machines will be fast enough and stuff will be cheap enough that there won't be a need to upgrade it out of the box OR upgrade it a couple years from buying it, and soldered RAM and permanent SSD's, for the performance gains, make sense. But today, right now, January 2013, it makes more sense (for me and how I use my computer) to have one that I can open up and upgrade.
It's not that bad when you compare to similar spec - from a major manufacturer.
This is AU pricing as I am in AU, but with no applecare equivalent, an HP elitebook 15" is as follows
http://www8.hp.com/au/en/products/laptops/product-detail.html?oid=5212912
And it has a crappier trackpad, crappier OS, crappier display (1366x768 standard) and feels cheap. I know this because it is my work machine.
Build quality on the elitebooks is above average for PCs, but still not as good as apple.
This is AU pricing as I am in AU, but with no applecare equivalent, an HP elitebook 15" is as follows
http://www8.hp.com/au/en/products/laptops/product-detail.html?oid=5212912
And it has a crappier trackpad, crappier OS, crappier display (1366x768 standard) and feels cheap. I know this because it is my work machine.
Build quality on the elitebooks is above average for PCs, but still not as good as apple.
You are the exact reason why bottom of the barrel notebook manufacturers are so popular. Because the average consumer can't answer why it's worth spending $2000 for a Apple Laptop with X specs when you can spend $900 and get one from dell or HP with identical specs.
If you actually look into laptop manufacturing and sales as a more indepth issue you'll probably see that MacBooks are actually a BETTER deal, than any other laptops.
First and foremost the reason why MacBooks are such a great deal despite the high price is the extremely high resale value. Apple goes a long way to maintaining a stable economy surrounding their products, the pricing is extremely stable and consistent and this leads to a very strong secondary market for their products (helped a lot by their desirability).
Look at it this way, if you own a regular notebook you probably use it for 2-3 years and throw it in the trash.
What do you do with a MacBook? You resell it in 2-3 years at a little more than 1/2 what you paid for it.
So really if MacBooks are TWICE as expensive, but you recover all of that markup, and likley more on the back end, they are actually going to be cheaper in the long run.
There's actually a good reason why Apple has such good resale value, and it's not their "desirability" and all that other nonsense people tell themselves to try to explain why Apple products are popular. The products they make are popular because they are actually properly built from the ground up.
A perfect example is the fans that Apple uses, most normal notebook fans are rated to be consistently run for 1 year. Apple's fans are rated to be run for 5 years. Why do their competitors use such cheap components? Well the answer has to do with the fundamental way the notebook industry works.
Because consumers are so poorly informed they just look at specs and so it ends up being a race to the bottom between laptop manfuacturers for who can deliver the cheapest products with the same specs. It's so extreme actually that the profit margins of most laptop manufactures is typical less than $50 on a product once everything is said and done. What this means is that saving $5 on fans by using the cheapest possible ones increaes the profits of these companies by 10%. That's huge for them so no wonder they do it.
All the other little components are also the cheapest possible kind. To the point where the least efficient fan motors, power management, mainboard etc etc are used. In fact the components in most regular consumer laptops are of such low quality that I've tested identically specced MacBooks against identically specced HP laptops (identical processor, video card, and same amount of ram and SSD size, with the screen turned off and the HP laptop took 29% more wattage to run at the exact same clock speed).
The screens are also of the lowest quality in most typical laptops, they aren't calibrated which makes a huge difference.
This example is a huge underestimate too, most laptop screens are much worse than this, and don't think you can buy a $150 calibration tool and fix the issue. Apple uses calibration equipment that's in the hundreds of thousands, and gives a supperior result, I've compared the difference with a $500 color spectromiter and it doesn't come close.
The low quality displays in most notebooks are also usually not capable of diplaying all colors in a computer's gamut. Who cares if a display is 1080p and 2.0 megapixels, and another is 1050p and 1.8 megapixels when the 1080p display can only show 50% of the colors (this is actually considered a standard or even "good" level for a mobile display, Apple displays are 72%-100%).
Then comes Apple's anti reflection technology. The typical notebook just uses nothing to prevent reflection or just a cheap 5 cent film that slightly blurs the reflection.
Apple uses anti reflective nano coatings that are made using vapor deposits with exotic chemicals (Magnesium Floride tetragonal birefringent crystals and Silcon Monoxide, that's deposited on the glass using high temperature plasma) that slightly alter the wavelengths of light hitting the screen. This is not a cheap process, but with the same amount of gloss you see a 70% reduction in glare on a MacBook screen. Before blurring or matting the screen.
Apple's innovation in ergonomics also cannote be overlooked, Mag Safe - thinner laptops it all adds up, you can't quantify how annoying it is to live without those factors but they simply make using the product that much better.
Apple is also one of the only innovators when it comes to notebook technology. The biggest innovation that is typical of another manufactuers is using an ultra wide screen display from some left over spare displays from cinematic screens.
Apple as an example of their innovation on the other hand actually designed an entierly new standard that shattered data speed records with their tunderbolt connector.
Apple innovates from a technical standpoint too. Their light up Apple logo because of it's sharp corners required the design of an entierly new machining tool that had to be engineered from the ground up. Just so they could get it the way they wanted. Any other company would have just slapped a sticker onto the product. Apple created an entire manufacturing process. Not even for their logo, for the corners of their logo. They also are the only consumer products company to use a new class of ultra high powered lasers just so they could machine their speaker grilles slightly smaller.
Apple also invented an entierly new fan that uses blades of a different size at different points along it's circumference so that it splits the fan noise over a wider frequency range which makes it quieter (it works).
Speaking of fan noise Apple actually tests their software and fan response so that their fans kick in as little as possible for the benefit of the user. Other manufactuers just set the fan to "auto" which results in it ramping up and down every few seconds, again because it's a race to the bottom. It's about whoever makes the worst product and sells it for the smallest amount of money for a given set of specs. Consumers just don't research the computer on anything other than specs, so no manufactuer really cares about making any of the components inside their product work.
The general build quality is also impecable. I've had 4 of my last notebooks literally fall apart from extremely heavy use. Yet you see old pre-unibody macbooks still running around no problem. You can use macbooks to an incredible degree and they will keep going no problem.
Part of the reason for that though is the software. The Apple OS is built around efficiency which means for a notebook, even with the exact same specs and hardware you will see almost double the battery life on a Macbook compared to a windows notebook.
Now personally I have a MacBook Air running OS X for battery life, and a retina running windows 7 to run specialized programs, but even so my MacBook with windows 7 is better than any other notebook I have ever owned.
Back to the OS, because the OS does more with less and because of Apple's support structure you can feasibly use a 7 year old polycarbonate notebook no problem. I know several people that still have polycarbonate macbooks.
The reliability is more than just in the all metal construction though, I've owned non-Mac all metal notebooks. Those are sand cast and crack when you drop them, MacBooks are designed to take abuse and shrug it off to the maximum of their abbility, not the minimum. That's the difference.
In the end, you can really break MacBooks down to two simple factors that make them better.
Their cutting edge quality and their dependability. These two factors are the hardest to quantify though and are the furthest thing there is from the specs, which is why MacBooks seem so overpriced to the untrained eye.
So going back to the first point, again when you take resale value into consideration, MacBooks are considerably cheaper. You'd have to be crazy not to buy a higher quality more dependable product for a lower net cost.
Apple is really the only manufacturer out there that makes high quality notebook. Many manufacturers will claim they make a high quality product, and will sell you junk. I've been very keenly aware of this problem what with having several $2000-$4000 laptops literally disintegrate with literally dozens of components failing on the same unit within a year in each case.
Until recently though Apple has been riding on their OS X coat tails and leveraging the much higher efficiency of their opperating system to ship computers with less than top end specs that still beat out the competition for standard usage but only when taken as a whole. For myself a dedicated windows user this proved to be a furstrating option as I really did not want to deal with the substandard garbage most notebook manufactuers spew together, but I had no choice because the only company that didn't play by those rules wasn't delivering a product that had the specs I wanted. Now Apple is making laptops with top of the line specs though.
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You nailed it.
You have to look beyond 'the big three' (RAM, Hard Disk, and CPU). Although that is what many people look SOLELY on.
Now, of course, you need to determine IF the plethora of advantages to an Apple notebook are worth it to you or not. My grandmother just got a laptop, I got her a $400 Lenovo last-year-leftover model. Good, solid machine. It's plugged in and at her desk, will likely NEVER leave that desk, and will be used, occasionally, for web browsing, e-mail, and... that's it! So for her, that laptop will work fine. So will an iPad, except that her eyes aren't so great so a larger display (15.6") set to a low DPI to blow up text is necessary. A desktop with an even larger display would be better, but she was convinced she needed a laptop, and convinced she needed that form factor so she could take it with her places. I doubt she will, but hey!
The battery ALONE is worth every penny, and I'm being absolutely honest here. If the ONLY advantage to my $1200 MBP over an $800 competitor (or cheaper!) was the battery, I would STILL buy it. Why? Unlike ANYONE else, it's a LiPo battery that is still SMALL (not hanging off the back), and it's huge (in capacity) because of Apple nixing the enclosures for the battery (which is why it's not quick-replacable).
I can take my laptop to class, ALL DAY and not even BRING a charger. Forget about trying to sit by an outlet or lug it around in my bag (even though the Apple charger is the most luggable!) I don't even have to bring it with me! It stays at home!
Or, I can go to a conference and spend the entire day on a charge, and re-charge when I get to the hotel room. I have one I go to once a year, it's a giant plenary, all sorts of business going on and voting and what not. It's about 10 hours of in and out, so say 5 to 6 hours of actual computer use in between breaks, workshops, and just not needing it and closing it (less than that actually). Last year, I had a windows laptop that stayed in the hotel room, I wasn't ABOUT to try and find an outlet and fish a cable in a room with thousands of people all seated in crowded tables and desks! Overwhelmingly, you saw glowing white Apple logos. Because everyone in my field is an Apple user? No, not really, I'm not a creative professional and it's probably no more Apple dominated in this field than anything else. BUT... the Windows laptops were in bags or the hotel rooms! Instead, folks like me were using an iPad or pen and paper!
Next year I'll have my MacBook, and I won't even bring the charger (except to the hotel room) don't need it! And being a LiPo, 3 or 4 years from now, I'll STILL be able to do the same thing without it losing most of it's charge. When it eventually does fail, I can have Apple replace it FOR me, for cheaper than I can BUY the batteries from the old Windoze machines (which are inferior batteries anyway).
The build quality, display quality, backlit keyboard, chiclet style keys, high speed I/O, looks, layout, durability, performance, OS, etc. etc. etc., are just icing on the cake.