I don’t know why any normal user, notice, I said normal, would buy a mac laptop or desktop these days. They are so old looking, outdated CPUs and memory and super expensive. Plus Windows 10 is really good now. A lot of my customers are upgrading to 10 pro now and bought new desktops as well.
Lenovo M93P Tiny Desktop with an i7 and SSD for under $500
Apple can’t even compete with that
There is a sizable difference between PCI-e SSD and HD form factor SSD
One runs a PCIe speeds, the other at SATA speed.
Memory for PCIe is much more expensive.
I had one for years. A 2011 Macbook Pro. I sold it a couple of months ago for almost half of what I paid.
My experience was they OS started a downhill slide after Leopard (2012). If you want to upgrade to an SSD for instance you find they put cheap a cheap HDD cable that can’t support the bandwidth. Around the end of 2012 Apple put the kabosh on owner upgrades by soldering in stuff and bricking computers via subsequent OS Upgrades(el captain fart sniffer).
That time period is when Jobs Left and Captain Hook came on board.
Over all it was a excellent experience but I would never do that now.
Apple has no need to compete with that. Cheap laptops are wintel domain.... always have been.
The question is, what is “premium” really worth? A $2000 laptop is a serious amount of cash these days, but high end professional Wintel Machines with similar specs come in at similar price points to Macbook pros.
Mac has never played in the low end, its not their market.
I’d want to see a comparison of the professional laptop market not the overall market, before I would concede that Mac’s are doing worse than their competition. Their competition isn’t the plastic acer laptop on the shelf at WalMart or Best Buy. THeir competition are things like the top of the line Thinkpad Pro etc.
I’ve got a Mac Pro with Xeon chips, 64 gig EEC RAM and it’s as fast as our high-end Lenovo workstation.
Granted, I HATE the trash can design, 1tb hdd limitation and lack of FireWire ports, but I load the heck out of that machine and it’s fast...
Ed