Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2012
- Messages
- 13,153 (2.87/day)
- Location
- Concord, NH, USA
System Name | Apollo |
---|---|
Processor | Intel Core i9 9880H |
Motherboard | Some proprietary Apple thing. |
Memory | 64GB DDR4-2667 |
Video Card(s) | AMD Radeon Pro 5600M, 8GB HBM2 |
Storage | 1TB Apple NVMe, 4TB External |
Display(s) | Laptop @ 3072x1920 + 2x LG 5k Ultrafine TB3 displays |
Case | MacBook Pro (16", 2019) |
Audio Device(s) | AirPods Pro, Sennheiser HD 380s w/ FIIO Alpen 2, or Logitech 2.1 Speakers |
Power Supply | 96w Power Adapter |
Mouse | Logitech MX Master 3 |
Keyboard | Logitech G915, GL Clicky |
Software | MacOS 12.1 |
<500 dollar machines are slow and clunky. Do they have SSDs? Are they light? Is their battery life >11 hours? Are drivers available for something other than Windows 8.1? There are a lot of "ifs" when it comes to PCs and that list of ifs is practically nonexistent with Macs. The simple fact is that you're not going to get build quality of a Mac out of a <500 USD laptop. Productivity costs money too and if the machine is slow, that's lost time. My father works at a windows shop and while it might be the incomptency of management, but even their new Windows machines are crap and never work right from the employee's point of view. Clearly that's not the case across the board, but I can say it absolute certainty that out of the box, a 500 USD PC laptop will never equate to a 1100 USD Air. You won't even see a modern i5 in a laptop with an SSD until you hit at least 700 USD and even still most of them are refurbished. All in all, it's more realistic you'll be paying ~800-900 USD for the same thing, which is a a smaller difference than half the price.But they're saving tons of cash by buying <$500 machines instead of >$1000 machines. You have to encounter a lot of problems across a lot of machines for Apple to catch up.
I'm not going to have this discussion with you if you pull numbers out of nowhere or compare a cheap PC with a HDD to an Air with PCI-E SSD. Compare apples to apples and you won't have a PC worth 500 USD when you putting it up against a modern Air.
I also think you missed the part where I said educational institutions also get a discount from Apple so it's not even like it's expensive as you think it is. 950-1000 is realistic for us and a 200 USD gap is worth the quality Apple provides for their hardware and software.