Posted on 02/26/2021 10:10:08 AM PST by dennisw
The Mac price crash of 2021 Macs hold their value. Where I live it’s not uncommon to see 10-, 12-, even 20-year-old Macs for sale. But the new M1 Macs have cratered MacBook resale values. The carnage is just beginning.
The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market. Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life?
That's a question savvy buyers are asking themselves. Not surprisingly, the most common answer seems to be "Nope!"
SAVVY SELLERS AND NAÏVE BUYERS I check Craigslist fairly regularly to keep track of what's for sale. I've seen an unusual bifurcation in the pricing for MacBooks.
There are more late-model Intel MacBooks showing up for sale. Some of those are showing context sensitive pricing, i.e. almost new MacBook Airs for $600 rather than the $800-$900 that some think their Intel-based machine is still worth.
But most seem to be hoping that good news travels slow. And why not?
Buying a used Mac laptop: How to avoid scams and find the best deals Unless buyers check out a site like Everymac they won't know what they're missing. The bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Air has a Geekbench 5 multiprocessor score that is almost 2.5x that of the early 2020, top-of-the-line quad-core I7. For 80 percent of the price. And most users won't need to spend the extra cash for the 16GB version since the memory management and page swapping is so efficient.
The contrast is even more striking when comparing MacBook Pros. Not only is the 13" MacBook Pro faster on the Geekbench 5 single and multiprocessor benchmarks than the top-of-the-line 16" MacBook Pro Intel I9, it less than half the price.
And it isn't just a single benchmark. Search on "M1 MacBook Pro vs 16 MacBook Pro" on YouTube to see multiple videos testing real world workloads on both machines.
To be fair, not everyone is impressed, often because the software critical to their workflow isn't optimized for the new M1 processor. But those corner cases don't reflect average users needs. In the meantime, most of those specialized apps are being recompiled to be M1 native over the next year.
THE TAKE The days when Intel produced startling performance gains with every new generation of x86 processors are, sadly, decades behind us. The industry hasn't seen this level of price/performance discontinuity since the jump from the Intel 8008 to the 8080.
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Every AI program ever developed, no matter how benign the beginning, eventually wants to take over the world..................
That didn’t happen to be a Protonmail account, did it?
No it was an old AOL account. I know it was probably time for it to go but I would have liked it to be my decision. Protonmail sounds interesting.
No doubt.
Of late, I'm of a mind that Mac is one of the few products that I'd recommend getting the extended warranty. Mine already paid off when the surface of several keys on my MacBook Pro wore off, actually making the letters unreadable. Wore the black plastic right off.
This happened right as it was exiting the 1 year warranty. Fortunately, I had an extra 2 years of "AppleCare" and as a result, got the entire top assembly, including the battery, replaced at about 13 months of age. Hopefully, they didn't use as cheap of materials on this keyboard as they did the last.
I think Steve Jobs would be pretty PO'ed about the QC of more recent Mac products - they were always expensive, but until a few years ago, were also pretty well built.
My transition to protonmail has been slow - mostly because I have so much invested in my gmail accounts. But I like the encryption and the ability to use my own domain name.
But this heavy encryption also means using a “bridge” app to be able to use apple’s Mail app with Protonmail. The update in question caused a hiccup that I had to deal with. All working now.
I will begin looking at a new Macbook Pro when the chips can handle more than 16GB of RAM. I realize the M1 chip supposedly handles memory better - but when working with really large files - I still need more RAM.
Back at you Sword!!! Sword Master. I only like the internet as far as computers go///// and opening numerous tabs (200 and more) on Brave and Chrome so for me it is an HP i5-8400 desktop, connected to a 27 inch IPS LED with Windows w 16GB Ram with a 500GB NVME drive from Western Digital. Installed on a desktop and a similar spec Dell laptop. Installed the same West Digital 500GB NVME on the Dell laptop plus a 16GBmem stick on the Dell laptop making this 20GB of memory total/
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