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Comment by duskwuff

4 months ago

Entry-level price for a new Mac, right now, is $700 (M1 Macbook Air at Walmart). It doesn't get you the best or the fastest, but it's a perfectly usable laptop. Or, if you're okay with something lightly used, a refurbished M1 Mac Mini is ~$500.

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duskwuff

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bluescrn  4 months ago

But Apple's entry-level Macbooks aren't intended to be bought. They have almost comically low amounts of storage and RAM for 2024 (8GB/256GB).

It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.

  • greedo  4 months ago

    The M1 MBA being sold by Best Buy and Walmart are perfectly fine for 99% of the computing world. Maybe not for gamers (most laptops suck for this), or for someone needing to crunch large datasets, but when this first came out, tons of developers were perfectly happy using it, even with small storage. Hell, my iMac I used up until buying a Mac Studio only had 256GB.

    • duskwuff  4 months ago

      Yep. 8 GB RAM isn't great, but for basic use -- web browsing, word processing, some light photo/video editing, etc -- it'll be perfectly adequate. Not everyone needs a supercomputer.

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  • hparadiz  4 months ago

    VSCode remote to my Linux desktop on LAN. The upsell is obvious but I'm not gonna drop $500 on 256 gb of disk space

goosedragons  4 months ago

That's a pretty time limited sale. I doubt the stock of unsold M1s is huge. It's also $700 for a new but essentially 3+ year old machine.