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Desktops (Apple) Intel Apple

Apple's Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks (zdnet.com) 181

"The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market," reports ZDNet: 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...!"

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's 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.

The article also makes a prediction: "The best deals on Intel 'Books are yet to come, assuming Apple offers retailers price protection.

"There seems to be a large inventory of Intel based MacBooks, and they have to clear them out before the end of 2021."
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Apple's Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:36AM (#61107472)

    A company releases a new product and their older products start selling for less!?!?!

    Im glad i was sitting down for this juicy tidbit

    • even the local old bear in the woods stopped himself from ... oh wait never mind he just cut loose.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:41AM (#61107482)

    It’s so efficient, you won’t even notice how much your SSD is getting thrashed!

    https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

    • Itâ(TM)s so efficient, you wonâ(TM)t even notice how much your SSD is getting thrashed!

      Most likely explanation is that someone ran a benchmark to test SSD performance and forgot to turn it off.

    • It's not clear that the amount of data written is a) accurate and b) a problem. The numbers are being shown in isolation, and nobody has any data from previous macs with SSDs to show that the wear is similar or not.

      To be clear: I'm not saying it's not a problem. It might be terrible and getting worse, the issue is that we don't really know. We don't know that the software is accurate, that the manufacturers respond to the disk queries in the same way, etc., etc. One person posting in that discussion suggest

  • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@@@slashdot...firenzee...com> on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:53AM (#61107512) Homepage

    For some use cases, the M1 macbooks are no good - users who need to run a lot of x86 virtual machines, or want to dual boot windows etc.

    • by darkain ( 749283 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:59AM (#61107530) Homepage

      You listed the literal only two use cases that don't work. And on that note, ARM VMs are working now. Plus with Graviton (AWS ARM) being cheaper than their x86 equivalent systems, this is the direction engineering is headed in general. Oh, and Windows ARM boots inside of a VM too on the M1 now.

      • You listed the literal only two use cases that don't work.

        Or those who work with substantial amounts of data. 16G isn't all that much: this laptop has 16G and it's a decade old! It' still a perfectly usable amount to be sure, but I don't wok this laptop that hard any more.

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by gnasher719 ( 869701 )

          Or those who work with substantial amounts of data. 16G isn't all that much: this laptop has 16G and it's a decade old! It' still a perfectly usable amount to be sure, but I don't wok this laptop that hard any more.

          All the M1 models are _low end_ Macs. What's confusing is that they are low end Macs with incredible performance for a low end machine, actually beating or coming very close in performance to much more expensive Macs. But they are low end Macs.

          Would be better to say "some use cases can now be handled perfectly fine by low end Macs with M1 processor, that previously needed a much more expensive computer. Basically anything that was limited just by processor performance and nothing else. "

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        You're a total amateur at making bullshit sound like a solution.

        "For some use cases, the M1 macbooks are no good" is a simple fact.

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Of course i listed the use cases that don't work, that's the whole point.
        Yes windows and linux versions for arm will boot inside of a vm, but sometimes you need the x86 version for compatibility.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Yes, this. It will take a while before M1 Macs can do local x86 VMs and dual boot. Maybe in a few years.

      • It will take a while, but someone will graft KVM onto the M1 framework. KVM will bring along x86 emulation goodness.
    • x86_64, not simply x86.

      big difference.

    • This has been the case where I've noted. I had a friend who wanted to show off his $5K Mac Pro. He was very proud of it. Then he had to do some "real work." This required him to boot up an Windows VM.

      it was very amusing over the years to listen to him pout about games I was playing on my Windows machine, that I paid half of what he he paid for his Mac. Games that where not available on the mac and never would be.

      I imagine with the release of the M1 Macs, games will completely vanish. Well maybe

  • by nyet ( 19118 )

    "memory management and page swapping is so efficient"

    Wow, it's magical.

    • Well it's true that swapping to a SSD is much faster than swapping to an HDD... Specially if it is a low-end SMR one.

      I would also think that Mac OS is better at handling heavy loads than Windows. But I don't know how it compares to Linux.

      • by nyet ( 19118 )

        Linux is a terrible memory hog now that everyone is using docker/snap (or statically linked binaries, or a full copy of the nodejs runtime in every node app), which replicates every single fucking runtime over and over again.

        But that isn't what the article is saying. It is saying the M1 has magically better memory management than other MacOS machines.

  • by jensend ( 71114 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:53AM (#61107600)

    Though the M1 is impressive, ARM Macs aren't crashing the prices of used Intel Macs because of how much better they are. They're crashing the prices because people don't want to be stuck on an architectural dead end.

    Everyone with an Intel Mac can now look forward to a near future when OS upgrades, application updates, and application availability will all fade away. The last version of MacOS to support PowerPC was released just 3 years after the Intel transition.

    • theoretically developers use a high-level language for the vast majority of their work and kicking off two compilers with a single button press in your IDE is not a significant technical hurdle.

      • by pjrc ( 134994 )

        Theoretically, all Mac software could be fat binaries for PPC, i386 and x86-64.

        Realistically, Mac software built for PPC faded away a long time ago.

        Maybe things will go differently this time? Somehow, I'm skeptical hardly any software publishers are going to ship Mac x86-64 support 5 years from now.

        • Indeed. I think it's an easy problem to solve, yet Apple is not going to make Xcode support it. Or worse, they'll support fat binaries for a brief period then drop it, like they have in the past.

          I suspect x86-64 support will end at one of their macOS releases. And that Xcode support will later stop supporting that last release. And Apple will pivot entirely to ARM, dragging the world's developers with them. It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to predict this, as this is how they handled the PPC support.

          P

    • I used to buy macs 15 years ago, but the hassle of jumping through all kinds of loops just to make an alternative OS boot put me off one day. (Is it still that difficult?)

      My understanding is that, taken at face value, Macs still have outstanding displays and keyboards, and are usually on-par with best-in-class regarding batterry life. The biggest weak points are the crappy OS, and mediocre performance and limited peripherals for the price, but if price plummeted, that'd probably offset those.

      So you'd get an

      • Never heard of virtual machines, have you? My Macbooks run VMs just fine thanks.
        • VMs aren't perfect for everbody or everything. Gaming for one takes a hit.

        • [x] Smart ass attitude
          [ ] Understood what my post is about
          [ ] Really thought this through

          *sigh* here we go.

          VMs are 2nd class citizens for a variety of reasons. Performance for starters, tough depending on the underlying VM tech, that can be mitigated a long way. (One of the best VM techs performance wise on the market today is, BTW, Linux's KVM... not VMware, not Parallels).

          Then, for a VM to work, you have to have a host OS in the first place - MacOS. When support for that ceases, your VM is a thing of th

          • by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @08:29AM (#61108056) Homepage Journal

            Then, for a VM to work, you have to have a host OS in the first place - MacOS. When support for that ceases, your VM is a thing of the past.

            I have a 2010 Mac Pro. 12/24 core, 64 GB RAM, several TB class HDs, One large 4k and several smaller 2k-ish displays. Apple's OS upgrade support for the machine (unfortunately, and let me just pause to say, "fuck you in the heart, Apple") stopped at OSX 10.12.6; the VMs (several versions of Windows, one of OSX, and two of Linux) continue to work perfectly well. I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Would you elaborate, please?

            So putting a VM on a MacOS X on an intel platform is pretty much an exercise in futility.

            Actually, that's where one would expect it to work best, presuming the VM is of an Intel OS (common Windows, Linux versions...) Certainly I haven't had any trouble with them. I haven't heard anything yet about anyone's adventures trying to run an Intel OS VM on the new Apple hardware, though I've been anticipating something about it with interest. Seems like it'd be... a significant technical challenge.

            Then the VM software itself - on Macs, typically it's Parallels

            Huh. VMWare here. I own Parallels, but the VMWare stuff consistently works better for me. [shrugs] YMMV.

            Or you can pay a Parallels tax every 1-2 years or so just to be able to boot the same Linux as you did yesterday.

            Um... no. No reason to lose a VM unless you change something else. No imperative to change something else unless something is broken, either. Though again, it'd be nice if Apple supported their hardware longer than just a few years. Win10 installed on my very early laptop without a single complaint and works fine. Microsoft shows Apple up pretty harshly in that regard. I could install the latest OSX if I cared to work around Apple's artificial "your machine is too old" fuckery... many others have done so. I have yet to see a real need, but I suppose someday I might get around to it.

            Then philosophy: one of the main reasons to run Linux is to run a free (as in speech) software stack.

            Most things build and run fine under OSX, sometimes given the usual hoop jumping (IOW, the same hoop jumping one often has to do to build under Linux. Dependency hell, etc.) Some of my daily driver software is Bash, Midnight Commander, various command line stuff, Python, all native under OSX, but I've got quite a few libraries and so on that I've built native. Then there are the various compatibility efforts; Macports, Homebrew, etc. I don't use them, but they're out there and plenty of people do use them with considerable success.

            But failing that, presuming OSX presents some kind of unsurmountable or highly inconvenient barrier, or if you just want a straight-up Linux environment, yeah, you can just build in a VM for most things.

            Also, I develop large, popular desktop applications ([1 [fyngyrz.com]],[2 [fyngyrz.com]]) for Windows in a Windows VM on my Mac. No problems whatsoever. I also build the same apps in an old version of OSX in a VM so as to have the largest range of OS compatibility. This has also proven to be a solid development paradigm, and completely avoids Apple's OS bitrot that locks out older OSX versions.

            it just feels wrong 6 ways from Sunday.

            Nope. Definitely nope. :)

        • by nyet ( 19118 )

          Good luck running a bunch of VMs in 8G of RAM

    • My three 2012 Macbooks are all still working nicely; thanks for asking
      • My three 2012 Macbooks are all still working nicely; thanks for asking

        For how much longer though? They're no longer supported by the latest OS and the 2011 ones, several versions back from that, are now past EOL (apparently---apple seem to think they're too cool to actually part with such information and leave to up to third parties to deduce it), so how long left on those 2012 era ones?

        I'm writing from a Thinkpad W510, released 2010. Ubuntu 18.04 will go EOL sometime in 2023, at which time I'll probably up

        • Apple has never had great support windows for their hardware compared to PCs, because they couple the OS to the hardware

          Quite often, it's because they artificially prevent new versions of the OS from installing on perfectly capable and compatible hardware. It's pretty common to spoof a later OSX installer into installing on a machine Apple calls out as "not compatible."

          They're pushing new hardware and as part of that drive, they impose artificial obsolescence on older machines well before there is any actua

          • Macs won't get any further updates 7 years after discontinuation of [new] sales. Anywhere between 5-7 years after you purchased your device (depending on how early/late you adopted that iteration) the computer will be stuck on a particular macOS version, regardless of actual system compatibility. Only the latest macOS and the two previous versions will continue to receive security updates.

            Now this might seem stingy at first, given we know that Microsoft has given at least 10 years worth of OS security u
    • I agree with you in theory, but there's a subgroup which also needs to be considered.

      The Intel machines before M1 can run Mac OS Mojave (10.14).This is the last OS which will run 32 bit programs. If a user does buy a M1 machine they may need to upgrade many of their older programs.

      Which could be an issue for some if they don't want to deal with subscription models like the ones Photoshop offers. In 1990 Version CS6 was released and was the last version you could buy outright. Adobe stopped selling this version in 2017. Is it worth buying a new Mac knowing you also may have to spend at least $20/month extra? How many other programs could suddenly go the subscription route?

      This is the position I'm currently in. I'm right now typing this on a 2012 Mac Mini which is still working fine. But I worry about how much extra expense would go into updating my software. (Side note: Currently looking at Krita, an open source Photoshop alternative.)

      • Crossover for M1 runs 32bit windows binaries, interestingly enough.
      • Affinity Photo can do a lot of what Photoshop does, and it's M1 native.

        I resisted Catalina, and only upgraded to Big Sur when my imac died. I lost a lot of compatibility with my existing software library, though, to be fair, most of those were games. Still, replacing x86-64 software that was bought and paid for with ARM software that is subscription based rankles.

        I have a license to CorelCAD that HumbleBundle sold me for $30. It doesn't quite work on my M1. The latest version is $699. What's more, Apple's i

      • Look at Affinity Photo (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/).

        It is a single-purchase improvement over Adobe Photoshop. Simpler work-flow. Opens Photoshop files. Has live adjustment layers and lots of other useful features.

        It's easy to switch to Affinity Photo from Photoshop, too. Affinity has both a video tutorial series (free) and a workbook (~$45) that each goes through all of the features in detail. You'll pick up enough to get started in a few minutes, and can probably make the switch for good in a

    • Their implementation of a double arch binary (PPC+Intel x86) was actually pretty good, as far as I can remember, and helped smooting the transition to the new architecture.

      But things went down the drain when they decided to x86 support in favor of x64 in the OS, thus preventing the use of a lot of legacy software. Now, by switching to ARM, it does not seem that they are implementing a double-arch binary like they did before. Instead they will rely on a VM that will have a performance impact on older softwar

    • Yay, Instead of an architectural dead-end where you can at least run your own code or your own OS, you cannow have a locked-down, locked-in, App-Store-centric dead end!

      This was relatively OK for phones, as you're not really going to create anything of significance on a little touchscreen. But we still need general purpose computers that we as individual owners have full control over.
  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @02:25AM (#61107626) Homepage Journal

    I know all too well that once OSX/macOS drops support for your hardware, the resale value plummets. This is in part because it gets harder to support old OS releases on the newer version of Xcode. Apple really wants you to move forward and not lock your apps to some old deprecated APIs. Sadly this means it's a real hassle if your company wants to support software development on a broader range of OS versions than Apple recommends.

    As a PC user I know no matter what I do, the resale value of a used PC is a tiny fraction of the purchase price, even if is less than a year old.

  • I heard the new m1s are powering the increase in value of bitcoin.
  • At running Geekbench. For those of you who spend all day running Geekbench I could not recommend them more highly. Your efficiency at running Geekbench will more than double.

    Meanwhile most reviews of actual workloads boil down to: "The M1 is amazing. Sure it's the same speed but on the Intel machine I heard a fan running!"

    • Getting thousands of users to run benchmarks (in order to garner statistically useful results) is difficult when the benchmarks take hours to run.

      Most users spend a lot of time in the Browser, and geekbench tests many of the same workloads.

      My most computationally intensive workload involved OCR-- but those sorts of benchmarks are nonexistent. (It seems that tesseract is much faster, but Abbyy Finereader is broken under Big Sur.)

  • Whenever you buy a new Apple product they Apple will glady give you money for your old device.
    The purpose of trade-in is to get old devices off the street to limit the used market.
    This is just a ploy to get people to take the trade-in so the old device can be destroyed (I mean recycled).

    • I just checked and Apple will pay $270 for a good condition 2013 Mac Book Pro.
      Apple wants the old devices off the street and into the landfill.
      The biggest competition for a new Apple device is an old Apple device.

  • by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @10:15AM (#61108240)

    This is impressive engineering on Apple's part. Looking at Geekbench, the M1 Air, Pro and Mini are within error bars of each other on multi-core performance. The amazing thing is that there are only three Macs that beat it - a maxed-out iMac, the iMac Pro Xeon and the Mac Pro Xeon.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by cfalcon ( 779563 )

      Shouldn't this make you question the power of Geekbench? Geekbench has always made questionable decisions. Recently-ish they've pulled out sustained CPU throughput tests. Many of their tests calculate tiny amounts in short bursts, so that a machine with a huge heatsink and phone doesn't have an advantage over like a phone. But in the real world, it's much better to have that huge heatsink.

      I could be mistaken on some of this, but this has been my impression, and this discussion thread is pretty good:
      http [reddit.com]

      • Yeah, except if you go on to YouTube, real-world comparisons are a dime a dozen, and the M1s really are better than any of the current Intel counterparts, particularly for non-parallel tasks. The one place where iMac Pros and Mac Pros beat out the M1s are when you're running extremely high loads and then try to multitask; they're just not built for that. But for compiling webkit or exporting video or whatever, the M1s perform extremely well without chewing up the whole battery. They just draw less power for

  • I still have legacy 32-bit software I need to run so I bought a loaded 2018 MBP. It'll be a while before I pull the trigger on an Apple silicon machine.

    • Yeah.... the problem with this is, the developers of Mac software are generally working on such slim profit margins at this point? A lot of programs just won't ever get a rewrite for 64-bit support. (Big list of OS X game titles I've got over here that are in that category.)

      IMO, Apple is on borrowed time as far as keeping much of a market for its laptops and desktops. Most of the Mac faithful cling to it because of past experience where the Mac was just a better user experience and had superior software a

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