I think the major reason for the aggressive price point of the Neo, and for not raising RAM and SSD upgrade prices in the MBP much, is that Apple is willing to give up some hardware margin to have more devices to sell services to. Unless I am mistaken, services have been key to Apple’s recent revenue growth. This isn’t a bad thing at this point, but could auger poorly if they foolishly chase recurring revenue at the expense of hardware quality (their software quality has already slipped in recent years).
> Apple is willing to give up some hardware margin
Did they give up a large chunk of margin, or have they been able to offset some of the higher costs of commodity chips by replacing high margin components with their own in house designs?
Designing and manufacturing your own components (CPU/GPU, Cellular modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, etc.) isn't free, but it's cheaper than paying someone else a markup at Apple's scale.
I expect a price increase. They had a bunch of hardware releases planned far in advance of the supply chain disruption. It'd be a bad look for their new products if they raised the prices on all these new devices at the same time; that'd be the primary discussion everywhere.
The smart move would be to release all your cool new toys at the traditional price points (or very nearly the same) and then raise prices a bit down the road. This way your reviews are strictly about the hardware / products rather than the prices. Bump them in two months. It'll be a big story, but it didn't prevent all the glowing reviews that were already published.
I think the Neo, possibly the 'e' phone, might be the only device(s) that doesn't increase. Taking a hit on 8GB of RAM might be tolerable for market gains when they're charging a kidney and a lung for higher-end devices.
Most of the services revenue is stuff you don’t have a choice not paying.
The Google default deal? That’s a massive chunk of services. App Store junk fees? The other massive part of it. The rest of their services are a much smaller part.
Ditch the Aluminium and go with a copper MacBook Pro. Or silver. If you get it with a terabyte of RAM, the silver shell will be a small part of the total costs.
Argentium 960 would most likely be the best alloy for the job, as it’s a good heat conductor and doesn’t tarnish like pure silver.
There are gaming laptops that come with power bricks rated for higher output than a Mac Studio's power supply. M3 Ultra levels of power dissipation are possible to handle in a laptop, but it wouldn't look much like a MacBook Pro. That kind of gaming laptop typically has four fans (compared to two on a MacBook Pro), and large vents on the sides, bottom, and back of the machine allowing them to move a lot more air through the system.
I kind of agree with you, but on macOS I still don’t have to ever think about drivers. The hardware just works. Linux isn’t quite there yet. My work XPS laptop running Ubuntu is close, but not quite the same.
> The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default,
Also, Japan generally has good mass transit throughout their cities, which essentially doesn't exist in the US. Less mass transit -> more cars -> need for parking -> larger buildings with setbacks to include parking -> less density -> less mass transit... Land use and transportation systems in the US have been co-evolved to the present sub-optimal state we have now.
This is a big misconception. The core neighborhoods of the big Japanese cities are dense, mixed-use, and have good mass transit. But as soon as you move a bit further away, they degenerate into endless urban sprawl like American cities. I know because I live in a small Japanese city, and it is just box stores, small detached houses, and two-story apartments.
> they degenerate into endless urban sprawl like American cities.
I will note, I have not lived in Japan. I'm just going by what I've seen hopping in street view on a lot of the smaller towns. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
While yes, the small towns are way more sprawlly than the big cities in Japan. However, what I've seen doesn't even come close to how spread out things are in much of the US. Can you point to any place that looks like this[0] in Japan? Note, that is an "urban" area, not rural.
Sure, far more people get around by car. Transit access falls off considerably. Big box stores have actual parking lots. But I don't see parking lots like this[1] common when browsing around on Google Maps.
If anything, a lot of these sprawling small towns are far more dense and walkable than what even "dense" US cities are! A lot of the streets I'm seeing making up a lot of these towns are a good bit narrower than what most neighborhood residential streets I've lived on here in the US.
Feel free to show me parts of Japan I'm missing though. Maybe it exists and I haven't seen it yet, I did just kind of hop between a dozen or so small towns all over Japan.
There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.
