Are Apple's machines really more expensive than they used to be?

[hal]

10 year old, no

5 year old, YES - lots of people do

[freeradical]

Onamuji wrote:
Note that Apple quickly dropped the price on that configuration to $2598.

That's $2896 in today's dollars.

[GuyGene]

hal wrote:
10 year old, no

5 year old, YES - lots of people do

:agree: And buying minimum RAM/drive at first then upgrading from OWC - now, canno'!!!

[S. Pupp]

Taking the long-term perspective, price are more reasonable today:

I spent $2000 in 1986 for a Mac Plus (per inflationcalculator.com, the equivalent of $4,379.69 in 2017 money).

$2500 got me a MacBook Pro 5,1 in late 2008 (the equivalent of $2,786.85 in today's money).


Used is the way to go, though:
2005, I bought a $10,000 IIfx ($18,363.20 in 2017 money) for $5 plus $20 shipping.
2002, I bought a Quadra 840AV for $10 + sales tax.
2001, I bought an SE/30 with an Xceed graphics card for $20 plus sales tax.
I used to marvel at the fact that I had about $20,000 of computing power at my disposal for less than $60. Too bad none of them ran Panther.

[Onamuji]

S. Pupp wrote:
Taking the long-term perspective, price are more reasonable today

That doesn't work. Component prices and manufacturing costs have gone down, plus economies of scale and supply-chain, etc.

Better to compare with what others sell similar gear for.

Haven't done a comparison for the MacBook Pro, but in raw spec's the top Dell XPS 13 is a better deal than the present-day MacBook Air for the same money... Plus, Dell has coupons and sales that bring the price down periodically.

[AllGold]

I agree that we can't go back too far because way, way back personal computers were specialty items but they have become commodity items more recently.

[M A V I C]

billb wrote:
[quote=ka jowct]
[quote=OWC Larry]
And don't forget - by design, Apple expects a faster replacement cycle on these Macs as well... What you configure is what you get... no memory, no storage, nada internal upgradeable or user serviceable.

Yes, that's where we get reamed by Apple these days IMHO. We pay Apple's premium prices for RAM and storage, and then have to throw away the whole machine when it becomes inadequate. The current strategy rubs me the wrong way. does anyone spend money on any 10 year old PC these days ? 5?
If I could run something newer than 10.6 on my MBP, then the answer would be yes to 10. As far as 5, I just bought a 2009 MP. I'm contemplating a 2012 MBP.

[sekker]

Apple discovered that many customers are less price sensitive as computers last longer these days. The iPad Pros are far more profitable than the iPad Air2.

I expect Macs to stay expensive.

[mrbigstuff]

I also have a2009 mbp, so it's nearly at the ten year mark, and I expect it will still be used in a couple of years hence.

But pricing must be adjusted for inflation to be at all comparable.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

$3100 - MSI GT73VR 17.3" GTX 1080, I7-6820HK, 64GB, 1TB SSD (two drive RAID) + 1TB HD
$3300 - MBP 15" Radeon 460M Pro, I7-6920HQ, 16 GB, 1TB SSD.

The MBP is $200 more with a quarter of the RAM and half the storage, but for some people it's worth the extra money for a light laptop. Graphics pros would abandon the MBP/macOS for the highest power mobile GPU. It is possible to get an eGPU for the MBP, but Apple still doesn't have drivers for the Nvidia Pascal chips coming up on a year.