No one is going to care. Reviewers will just tell buyers to get the 512Gb SSD or higher version.
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Windows Laptop Makers 'Worried' About New MacBook Air Impacting Sales
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No one is going to care. Reviewers will just tell buyers to get the 512Gb SSD or higher version.
Umm, whatever.....
Seriously, Im a Mac person, been so forever, but I am not buying this claim, as much as inflation will impact them more.
Apple Silicon has been amazing for battery life. It has been competitive in power, and graphics, but some of the recent offerings by Intel show real power, even though they simply cannot compete on power consumption.
I don't think that will hurt their sales as much as inflation.....in five years, if Intel cannot figure out how to not be power hogs, they will be in so much trouble, but right now, the issue is Apple Silicon and Windowsemulators do not work so well. If you could turn your MacBook M2 into a Wintel replacement, replete with apps, its nights out for Intel...
Seriously, Im a Mac person, been so forever, but I am not buying this claim, as much as inflation will impact them more.
Apple Silicon has been amazing for battery life. It has been competitive in power, and graphics, but some of the recent offerings by Intel show real power, even though they simply cannot compete on power consumption.
I don't think that will hurt their sales as much as inflation.....in five years, if Intel cannot figure out how to not be power hogs, they will be in so much trouble, but right now, the issue is Apple Silicon and Windowsemulators do not work so well. If you could turn your MacBook M2 into a Wintel replacement, replete with apps, its nights out for Intel...
Mac market share has doubled in the last decade, and quadrupled in the last two decades.
Market share gains have accelerated recently with the higher performance value of Apple Silicon, Macintosh is the only PC line that’s growing sales.
I have been blessed with an HP 14” Laptop at my current assignment. It’s plastic, screen is so, so, and it can last max 4 hours on battery. Just for fun I looked it up and learned that it was 200USD more than my own MB air M1 with the same specs, in Denmark that is.
If you are not heavily invested in Windows apps, Macs now are a better deal. But There is also a segment below the Apple price range that should not be ignored.
Competition is good. Can’t wait to see what intel can provide once they switch to TSCM production. Or when ARM for Windows starts happening.
If you are not heavily invested in Windows apps, Macs now are a better deal. But There is also a segment below the Apple price range that should not be ignored.
Competition is good. Can’t wait to see what intel can provide once they switch to TSCM production. Or when ARM for Windows starts happening.
It's going to take a long time before the general public realize the full impact of Apple Silicon on the Windows PC. The numbers are there on paper though, and the real world performance is undeniable.
Apple has been around since the late 70s. In my opinion, it took all the way up to a couple years ago for them to stop being shrugged off as an anomaly and started earning respect as a real tech company. The hit pieces and click bait still get written, but I think even the people writing it started realizing they're screaming into the void. I often thank my lucky stars that they've always had leadership that understands the long-term vision and is able to stay focused on the task at hand. Most companies do not have that patience.
He can't even stand to look directly at it!
Correct. Most people that buy these will buy them because they now come in blue, because they are going to college and want/need a MacBook like their fiends, or because it's time to upgrade their 8 year old MacBook Air because it's just time. The vast majority of people that will buy the new M2s won't care about specs, won't do any research, and won't be negatively impacted by diminished storage performance on the low-end model. The next biggest group of customers will be corporations and institutions that also won't care. The comments section, tech pundits and those that regurgitate their opinions while telegraphing their feigned buyer's dilemma over the lack of spec porn on an entry-level product are so far down on the list or prospective customers that they are somewhere between imaginary and a rounding error.
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I'd venture to say that most of the people who use/want a MacBook Air don't hem and haw over the price. They just buy it when they need it. The average notebook user does not sit here splitting hairs over how many performance gains or hours of battery life you get for this price vs. that price and they don't agonize over the yearly upgrades either. They just buy the computer, and if it's an Apple computer, it's quite often a MacBook Air.
The world is a lot bigger than commenters on MacRumors realize. Apple is a popular brand and has been for decades, despite the fact that it's always been more expensive. I think it's time people stopped to think about the fact that most of the Apple device-buying public doesn't care. Not only do they not care about what this year's Air cost compared to last year's, they also don't care about the battery capacity, refresh rate, CPU speed, number of cores, or any of that. They just know if they buy a Mac, they're going to get a nice, streamlined, quality experience.
I think they've already signaled that they need to pivot--I'm fairly certain they'll become a chip foundry to avoid the onslaught of ARM systems.
Well you should take a more careful look at Windows laptops.
A few months ago I bought a Vivobook Pro 15. And the store from which I bough this laptop also had the base M1 Air(8Gb RAM, 256Gb storage) at the exact same price but the Vivobook has the following specs: a larger 15.6inch HDR OLED screen,Phantom validated(it covers 100% of P3 color space and amongst others Netflix movies look sublime) , 16GB RAM, 1Tb Nvme SSD which does 3000Mb read and write speeds(better than M2), an 8 core 5800H, it has multiple USB-A ports, USB-C and HDMI and last the most important thing a RTX 3050 with studio drives. The laptop can do gaming, it can do creative work no problem. It's generally silent, fans are audible only when doing serious work and only get loud in full CPU/GPU load. The only areas where it loses to the Air is: battery(which I already knew and accepted before I bought it) and speakers, but in most ways is better than a Macbook Air.
Asus also has very decent 2022 Vivobook laptops on the market with Ryzen 6000 series APUs which have shown to have really decent performance and efficiency. It's not about only Intel anymore, AMD right now has overall the most balanced x86 laptop CPUs.
Regular people buying "only" 256GB base model probably couldn't care less -- let alone be aware of -- "SSD-gate". They are unlikely hard-core users that would notice such things.
People in this forum are not "regular". That didn't sound right.
it does support 2 displays one native air display another external monitor, you mean 2 external monitors ?
I think the worry is warranted - but not from a technical perspective. While I'm convinced most folks would be more productive, more secure, and generally happier on a Mac vs. Wintel, I doubt a faster MBA is the thing that'll suddenly create a great conversion wave. Not to put too much of a political spin on this post, but it's sort of like Trumpers vs. realty - at this point, no mere facts will move anyone.
But back to my reasoning for why Wintel laptop makers should worry: the economy. The Winter crowd is a lot more cost sensitive than the market Apple pursues. As the world moves towards recession, the low-end markets of any product, including laptops, dries up a lot more quickly than the high end. That's why we've been seeing the recent downturn in laptop sales in general, but with Apple laptops actually increasing in sales. The low end laptop sales are way down and high end laptop buyers are increasingly choosing Apple.
But back to my reasoning for why Wintel laptop makers should worry: the economy. The Winter crowd is a lot more cost sensitive than the market Apple pursues. As the world moves towards recession, the low-end markets of any product, including laptops, dries up a lot more quickly than the high end. That's why we've been seeing the recent downturn in laptop sales in general, but with Apple laptops actually increasing in sales. The low end laptop sales are way down and high end laptop buyers are increasingly choosing Apple.
the YouTuber used the 13-inch MacBook Pro for exporting 8K RAW footage. Yuryev himself admits that this is the most resource-heavy test Max Tech uses to test the true limits of a computer. The question is, just how often are users going to try to do the same on a $1,299 notebook? Probably not very often.
edit 8K video on XPS13 and see if you can even edit it.
That's a chip that eats nearly 4x as much power for the CPU, I certainly hope it's faster - it's not even close to 4x faster though. Also, as the article notes, the M2 absolutely murders that i7 on GPU performance while *still* sitting in 1/4th the power envelope.M2 is slower than an i7. What are you talking about?
Apple says new M2 chip won't beat Intel's finest
Apple's new M2 is a worthy sequel to the M1 but doesn't flat out beat Intel's best CPUs in performance.www.pcworld.com
And bear in mind that power comparison is the whole SoC to the i7, that doesnt take into account the power draw of RAM for ex in the intel machine
Interestingly, I'm not so sure? Windows 11 is turning out to be nothing more than a "warmed over Windows 10" with a lot of "features" added that people dislike. For example, Microsoft keeps toying with the idea of displaying ad banners inside the file explorer in it. (Yuck!) And they're moving towards eliminating the ability to create local user accounts on a Win 11 box. They're requiring you create a Microsoft cloud account to tie to the local ones.
(Right now, you can still make a local user account AFTER you set up the initial administrator one with a Microsoft cloud login associated with it. Then you can just ignore the initial account except maybe for emergencies. But their setup wizard for new Windows installs won't let you do a local account anymore as the only one on the PC.)
The difference is that this is the first time in the $1k-$1.5k range that Apple laptops offer comparable or greater CPU performance than Windows laptops. Previously, what you got when you bought an Apple laptop in that range was mostly the better OS (which is huge for me) and battery life and (sometimes) a better display or SSD.
More broadly, the conventional wisdom has historically been "Don't buy a Mac unless you need it for the OS; you get more hardware for the money with a PC". And I've found that to be generally true—until the introduction of AS, which is staring to upend this.
But a weirdo somewhere on the internet told me that the latest processor from Intel is already faster than M1 Ultra, and Windows does gaming. He swears he knows what he's talking about, except he never heard of PlayStation 5.
I have been saying long before even the rumors of Apple creating chips for their computers that I see a future where the vast majority of consumer devices, computers, game consoles, television, etc would be ARM-based because of how quickly they have been advancing and so on. Back then (like ten years ago) a lot of people who thought they knew about chips would try to explain to me how that couldn't work.
I don't think it's far-fetched to say that the majority will be ARM-based within the next ten years. The rest of the computers out there will likely be some sort of SoC solutions or for that hobbyist that still wants to build their own PC but those will come at even more extreme cost than they do now.
The M series of chips to me is the biggest innovation that Apple has shown since the passing of dear leader Jobs, and it reminds me of the good ole days when we would all say "F" Wintel and talk about how much more superior our RISC based PowerPC chips were.
I don't think it's far-fetched to say that the majority will be ARM-based within the next ten years. The rest of the computers out there will likely be some sort of SoC solutions or for that hobbyist that still wants to build their own PC but those will come at even more extreme cost than they do now.
The M series of chips to me is the biggest innovation that Apple has shown since the passing of dear leader Jobs, and it reminds me of the good ole days when we would all say "F" Wintel and talk about how much more superior our RISC based PowerPC chips were.
Yup. Why make your own proprietary goods and services when you can just legally steal someone else's?
You laugh, but Nilay Patel from the Verge literally thinks this should happen. For example, he believes it's not fair that AirPods are so successful and thinks that the W1 chip should be licensed out to competitors in the name of "fairness". Hmmm, I wonder why he never made it as a patent lawyer.......
It would not surprise me one bit if something akin to this happened in the next 3 years.
You are mostly correct. PC makers don't make much money off of selling anything, but their lowest margins are probably in the below $500 market. Typical PC makers have an average sales price of under $500 vs. Apple's $1,400. They sell huge volumes of bottom of the barrel laptops and desktops, selling at $800 is a higher end laptop for them.
Overall PC makers net margins are in the 2-4% range, Apples is in the 15-20% range. Partly because they sell mostly cheap plastic PCs/Laptops, and partly because people are willing to pay extra for the intangibles and custom features of Macs.
Overall because of its focus on building more valuable higher end PCs, Apples 10% market share by units translates into 20-25% of industry revenues, and over half of total net profits of all PC makers.
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Intel can't become a successful chip foundry, at least not profitably. And not because they are two generations behind in process, though overcoming that disadvantage is far from a gimme. The reason is that successful foundries need to run at high volumes and max capacity to produce chips at the lowest possible costs. To run at high volumes requires big customers. Intels foundries will have the following large customers: Intel and <crickets>.
The biggest volume customers for chip foundries are Apple, AMD, NVidia, Samsung, etc, etc, etc. None of these companies want to give business to a direct competitor like Intel. One of the main reasons Apple dumped Samsung's fabs to switch to TSMC was they didn't want to give their new designs to Samsung. No matter how much Samsung said they'd have a firewall up between their fabs and their own chip designers Apple could not afford to believe them.
So Intel is pouring massive amounts of investment into new fabs alongside a half dozen others including TSMC, that should all come online right in the middle of the next glut in chips from the notoriously cyclical semiconductor business. The only way to get the volume commitments they need to keep those fabs running efficiently will be to undercut everyone by selling at near cost. And that might not even work, given Apple won't be comfortable handing them the design documents for the next generation of Apple Silicon.