I guess for desktops you have a point, especially if you build it yourself. I was thinking of laptops mostly and also considering the build quality and things like the keyboard/trackpad, screen and speaker quality. If you want something comparable running Windows the price difference isn’t going to be massive.
You can buy a top CPU laptop then upgrade or even pay to upgrade with high quality ram and storage modules and you would still be paying less than an equivalent Mac. Which you can’t upgrade of course, because the only option is buying as is out of the gate. No matter what Apple says, 32 GB of ram simply doesn’t cost $300, their pricing is meant to fleece customers.
Is there a particular model you’re thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that the Windows laptops don’t have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc: the options get limited pretty quick.
Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon’s RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops othe same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple’s 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.
PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option at any budget, and pretty cost effective and most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominate their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.
The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but the reality is a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; and Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th gen Thinkpad just started running good). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there really much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy it, manage it, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It’s about time to replace my Thinkpad.
Running LLMs is not a feature that 99% of users need or want. Look at all the AI laptops flopping in sales. People don’t care about RAM soldered to the motherboard to squeeze a milisencond on a feature they don’t use. It’s a money grubbing strategy, plain and simple.
I guess for desktops you have a point, especially if you build it yourself. I was thinking of laptops mostly and also considering the build quality and things like the keyboard/trackpad, screen and speaker quality. If you want something comparable running Windows the price difference isn’t going to be massive.
You can buy a top CPU laptop then upgrade or even pay to upgrade with high quality ram and storage modules and you would still be paying less than an equivalent Mac. Which you can’t upgrade of course, because the only option is buying as is out of the gate. No matter what Apple says, 32 GB of ram simply doesn’t cost $300, their pricing is meant to fleece customers.
Is there a particular model you’re thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that the Windows laptops don’t have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc: the options get limited pretty quick.
Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon’s RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops othe same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple’s 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.
PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option at any budget, and pretty cost effective and most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominate their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.
The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but the reality is a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; and Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th gen Thinkpad just started running good). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there really much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy it, manage it, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It’s about time to replace my Thinkpad.
Running LLMs is not a feature that 99% of users need or want. Look at all the AI laptops flopping in sales. People don’t care about RAM soldered to the motherboard to squeeze a milisencond on a feature they don’t use. It’s a money grubbing strategy, plain and simple.