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John Dvorak said many, many decades ago (80s/90s) that the computer you want will always cost $3000. That statement has been more/less true for some time periods than others, but with some wiggle room I’ve found it to be accurate enough.

Care to guess the approximate price of the MBP I bought earlier this year?

by ahknight13 hours ago|

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My heavily-upgraded M1 Max came in slightly over that when I got it five years ago. (Still going very, very strong.)

This new Studio? Can't find a config under $5k I'd bother with. But for the MBPs that number still mostly tracks for the average Pro user. (I buy large and run it into the ground so long I mistake the ground for the computer's remains.)

by rogerrogerr1 hours ago|

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I got a 64GB M1 Max four years ago or so, used. Felt like a ridiculous overspend at the time, but I'm sure smug about it now.

by mikestew13 hours ago|

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I buy large and run it into the ground so long I mistake the ground for the computer's remains.

My still-being-used 2012 MBP (which cost me about $3K) says, “hi”.

And, as you point out, the new computers I want blow Dvorak’s hypothesis out of the water. Never would I have guessed 30 years ago that Dvorak would be wrong the other direction on price.

by seanmcdirmid14 hours ago|

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I bought my refurbished M3 Max MBP with 64 GB for $3k a couple of years ago. Before Ethan I never spent more than $2k for a computer.

by mikestew13 hours ago|

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The “spend” and “want” number might differ, depending on one’s financial state. I know I’ve purchased plenty for less than $3K. But the one I wanted…

by seanmcdirmid4 hours ago|

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I'm old and established (after spending most of my life not), but ya, I get what you are saying. It was a huge leap for me to spend $3k on a laptop.

Before local LLMs became a thing, I had completely lost interest in buying anything but the cheapest laptop. It felt like "personal computing" was a solved problem. But...it actually isn't, and this is exciting.

by jacobr114 hours ago|

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They still are, if what you want is roughly the same as the prior generations capability with some uplift (making then number up, but say 20% faster or more ram or whatever).

What is changing is that there genuine demand for more capabilities disproportionate to the cost decrease curve. Fab demand and supply constraints have slowed or even reversed some cost decreases - but that is still getting absorbed by the overall systems costs when you are looking at things like laptops. If you all you want is the last decades demand to browse the web and use office - things are cheaper than ever.