Come off it. A Mac Mini in 2005 started at $499, allowing for inflation that would now be $645, today it is $799
You can see price increase across all of their product lines over the last couple of years.
Higher margins to offset slowing sales. What pisses me off is that the only slow down on the Mac is due to tardy refreshes and expensive features, such as the Touch Bar, that almost no one wants.
And yes, I do think that the current price gouging by Tim and his team is a mistake.
I joined the Apple family with the original Mac Mini, at the entry level price point it was around 30% more than the equivalent PC at the time, but the difference was justifiable for me and at a point where I could afford to dip my toe into the Apple world. Many years later and I’ve converted most of my family and friends.
But Apple’s new pricing strategy is making it really hard to justify to people, or indeed myself.
The iPhone XS at £999 doesn’t look like such a good deal against the £300 Pocofone.
The £1200 MacBook Air doesn’t look like such a good deal against the £700 Dell XPS.
I always found that Apple was around 30% more than the nearest true competitor, not the build your own stuff. But now they are 50-60% more and it’s hard to justify that.
At 30% more you can talk about the build materials, the OS, the overall fit and finish etc.
But at twice the price.........
For the first time in around 13 years I find it difficult to recommend Apple products to my friends and family. I know that many people will assume I am some kind of troll, but I’m really not. I love Apple.
But at the same time that their competition is catching up in terms of hardware quality, whilst also lowering their prices Apple is increasing their price whilst standing still.
The new MacBook Air is a lovely machine, I’ve had a good play with it at the Apple store, but it’s just a long overdue evolution of the original MacBook Air and other laptop manufacturers, such as Dell with their XPS were already there.
I’ll hold out for a bit, my trusty MacBook Pro from 2014 should give me a bit more time. But when I come to upgrade it might well not be to a Mac, and that’s just sad.
Pocofone isn't a great option for those of us in the US...
Another thing to consider, especially for our US readers, is that the biggest catch will be cellular band compatibility. This
phone is intended for Asian and European markets, so connectivity in
the US will be rather limited. No CDMA, which rules out Sprint
and Verizon. If you're with AT&T you would get 3G band but LTE will
be difficult. The Pocophone F1 has band 1(2100), 3(1800), 5(850),
7(2600), 8(900), 20(800), 38(2600), 40(2300), 41(2500). Band 5 is the
only one active in the US, as a supplementary band for AT&T and
T-Mobile.
Come off it. A Mac Mini in 2005 started at $499, allowing for inflation that would now be $645, today it is $799
You can see price increase across all of their product lines over the last couple of years.
Higher margins to offset slowing sales. What pisses me off is that the only slow down on the Mac is due to tardy refreshes and expensive features, such as the Touch Bar, that almost no one wants.
And yes, I do think that the current price gouging by Tim and his team is a mistake.
I joined the Apple family with the original Mac Mini, at the entry level price point it was around 30% more than the equivalent PC at the time, but the difference was justifiable for me and at a point where I could afford to dip my toe into the Apple world. Many years later and I’ve converted most of my family and friends.
But Apple’s new pricing strategy is making it really hard to justify to people, or indeed myself.
The iPhone XS at £999 doesn’t look like such a good deal against the £300 Pocofone.
The £1200 MacBook Air doesn’t look like such a good deal against the £700 Dell XPS.
I always found that Apple was around 30% more than the nearest true competitor, not the build your own stuff. But now they are 50-60% more and it’s hard to justify that.
At 30% more you can talk about the build materials, the OS, the overall fit and finish etc.
But at twice the price.........
For the first time in around 13 years I find it difficult to recommend Apple products to my friends and family. I know that many people will assume I am some kind of troll, but I’m really not. I love Apple.
But at the same time that their competition is catching up in terms of hardware quality, whilst also lowering their prices Apple is increasing their price whilst standing still.
The new MacBook Air is a lovely machine, I’ve had a good play with it at the Apple store, but it’s just a long overdue evolution of the original MacBook Air and other laptop manufacturers, such as Dell with their XPS were already there.
I’ll hold out for a bit, my trusty MacBook Pro from 2014 should give me a bit more time. But when I come to upgrade it might well not be to a Mac, and that’s just sad.
Read the editorial again. This isn't about Windows, that is an entirely separate discussion. These are literally Apple's pricing, the retail launch prices all here under all the relevant CEOs, even Jobs. You don't have to like them, but facts are facts. Furthermore, the margins have been the same for at least the last 12 years.
And, the low-end mini today is positioned at a higher market segment than the G4 mini was, or the $499 core solo one was. Saying otherwise is disingenuous. We've said before that Apple would benefit from a switcher model, but the "low" end mini now is not aimed at the same market segment that it used to be.
But you also can’t deny that Apple have been ramping up prices across the board for the last couple of years either.
With pretty much every refresh comes an increased price, from the Apple Pencil to the MacBook Air.
Of course the 2018 model is better than the previous one, how could it not be.
The Mac Mini hasn’t actually seen a proper upgrade since 2012 as the 2014 model was slower than the 2012 one. For a 6 year gap you’d expect an upgrade like the one we have now.
That’s not to say that the 2018 Mac Mini is a bad machine, it’s not. But like all of Apples recent Mac’s, apart from the iMac Pro, they have moved from being around 30% more to 50% more for comparable hardware from the likes of Dell.
If Apple wants to sell less for more, well that’s their choice. But I think it’s going to bite them in the arse.
I’ve done a rough calculation and I think I could directly link myself to around £250,000 worth of Apple hardware sales since I got that first Mac Mini. That’s a lot of phones, computers and accessories.
But now I’m starting to recommend alternatives, and if I’m doing it you can better others are too.
For me it’s sad that Apple is deliberately leaving behind the higher end of the consumer space.
Oh look, another anti-fan who thinks Apple doesn’t know what it’s doing and is DOOOMED. Cute.
Oh look, another fanboy with his head stuck in the sand who thinks Apple is infallible and invulnerable
It does not matter how expensive macs were in the past. Heck I paid over USD$4000 for a PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” back in the day. What matters today is the price of a Mac compared with comparable windows machines.
Not hardly, as Macs have also nearly always been more expensive than a comparable Windows machine. The argument that we've been assaulted with, with a new battery after the Mac mini rollout, is that Tim Cook has unnecessarily jacked up prices, and only he has ever had the gall to price machines so high.
That is false, at its face.
Not true.
Mac Pro from 2006-2010 was VERY price competitive. Hmm, I wonder what changed after that. I guess that's when Apple started building its 'deep pipeline'.
But then again that doesn't fit with the article's narrative here, so I'll assume this post will be deleted much like my earlier, "all apologies" comment/post.
This is an allowed post. Your previous post was you being a jackass, again -- which is not.
My brand new Mac Mini is shockingly fast computing Daz3D scenes compared to my old 2014 Mini. Still don’t need to run a virus scanner. I’m a happy camper.
I think the first Mac I used, was a Mac Plus, but I didn't know too much about them at the time, except that I thought the price was rather crazy compared to my Atari 1040ST, especially since it wasn't even color. The school I went to had an obscenely simple CAD app on it that I used to poke fun of. You literally had to type coordinate values, and I could draft circles around it on paper... we know how that ended, though. (Later, I'd get in debates with traditional publishers about the same thing happening to publishing and desktop publishing, but I wasn't very successful in convincing many of them.)
Then, one of my friends got a Mac II. It was actually one of some initial limited run with signatures inside, and lots of wires and jumpers and such. His brother was a comp-sci prof at Ohio State, and I guess he was able to pull some strings to get it for his little brother. My friends enthusiasm (and that it was color) helped win me over to the Mac, though I still used my Atari for several years, and felt the software was more advanced in terms of what I was able to accomplish with it (or at least what I had access to).
The article brings back some memories, through. My first Mac was an LC, though I used an SE/30 at work to create some illustrations and DTP stuff). I later also had a PowerBook 100... and somewhere in there like a 145 and 165 (if memory serves). I had some odd models and clones through the years too. I bought a used PowerMac G4 somewhere in the 2000s from a friend who worked at Blizzard after he upgraded. But, I think the 2000s were the sweet-spot in terms of Mac pricing value. But, yes, that was a blip on the whole timeline, and pricing now seems to be drifting up more towards more of historical Macs. The mini, IMO, is a killer deal, though (the current exception)!
I had a bunch of MBPs through the 2000s, both personally and company-issued (we'd get new computers at least once per year). I also owned a mini, a couple iMacs, etc. as well as other laptops like MBA and MB.
As an aside, the article also brought up some other memories...
I had the opportunity to talk to Jef Raskin for a couple hours once, but didn't realize who he was at the time other than he had associations with Apple. His son was interested in 3D solids modeling and rendering, and Jef was given my name as someone in the area he could contact to talk more about some of the software I used.
Actually, I ended up meeting a bunch of interesting people via my years in CAD/3D, like John Knoll and Alex Lindsay (on 3D forums I hung out in... I nearly went to one of Alex's early dvGarage meetings, but my work schedule wouldn't allow ), as well as industry pioneers like Tim Olsen (the guy who invented a lot of the CAD GUI innovations and technologies we see today), and even a bona fide rock-star, David Diamond, the former keyboardist/guitarist for the band Berlin (who got into 3D work and wanted a demo of the program I used).
I got two of the bazookas on lint money. A D500 for $1.5K and full D700 beast for $2.4k, sure it's 6 years old, but new when I got it. The bazookas are just crazy fast and why limit yourself to PC's inferior microarchitecture - video is dual 384 bus - kills PC 256 or dual 256. Some will grouse about storage because the HD is only 256 GB. I use a pay cloud with 2 TB and it protects from hardware failure, ransomeware, accidental deletions, destruction of equipment, and theft.
Comments
Then, one of my friends got a Mac II. It was actually one of some initial limited run with signatures inside, and lots of wires and jumpers and such. His brother was a comp-sci prof at Ohio State, and I guess he was able to pull some strings to get it for his little brother. My friends enthusiasm (and that it was color) helped win me over to the Mac, though I still used my Atari for several years, and felt the software was more advanced in terms of what I was able to accomplish with it (or at least what I had access to).
The article brings back some memories, through. My first Mac was an LC, though I used an SE/30 at work to create some illustrations and DTP stuff). I later also had a PowerBook 100... and somewhere in there like a 145 and 165 (if memory serves). I had some odd models and clones through the years too. I bought a used PowerMac G4 somewhere in the 2000s from a friend who worked at Blizzard after he upgraded. But, I think the 2000s were the sweet-spot in terms of Mac pricing value. But, yes, that was a blip on the whole timeline, and pricing now seems to be drifting up more towards more of historical Macs. The mini, IMO, is a killer deal, though (the current exception)!
I had a bunch of MBPs through the 2000s, both personally and company-issued (we'd get new computers at least once per year). I also owned a mini, a couple iMacs, etc. as well as other laptops like MBA and MB.
As an aside, the article also brought up some other memories...
I had the opportunity to talk to Jef Raskin for a couple hours once, but didn't realize who he was at the time other than he had associations with Apple. His son was interested in 3D solids modeling and rendering, and Jef was given my name as someone in the area he could contact to talk more about some of the software I used.
Actually, I ended up meeting a bunch of interesting people via my years in CAD/3D, like John Knoll and Alex Lindsay (on 3D forums I hung out in... I nearly went to one of Alex's early dvGarage meetings, but my work schedule wouldn't allow