I've been having some sort of severe performance issue in one form or another since Mojave/Catalina or so with a 2017 MBP and a 2020 M1 Mac Mini.
The symptoms is always generally poor performance after the system has been running a while (4h to a week, varies), usually with WindowServer using CPU cycles non-stop and UI that felt choppy across all programs.
This seemed to happen frequently after "opening many files", like doing some recompiling with Xcode for a few hours, or indexing a large volume with Spotlight. Rebooting helps temporarily.
Today I realized that data read/written since boot was about 1TB in a few hours on a brand new OS install, and I traced this back to the com.apple.Safari.History process. Somehow having bookmarks and previously using Safari 15.x caused a huge amount of I/O that wouldn't stop - the solution was to remove all bookmarks and reading list items. Performance was immediately back to normal, no reboot needed.
So just logging in with your iCloud id, you could be "importing" whatever performance problem you're having on a new install.
I recommend you reboot and take a look at your disk I/O stats - maybe this will help someone!
Right, but I’m not trying to determine Apple’s markups. I just want to know where to buy a new Mac for myself. I don’t care who gets the markup, Apple, the gov’t, whatever.
Since you use words like “misleading” and “honest”, I wonder what your agenda is. Maybe you’re an Apple shareholder who’s allergic to any perceived criticism.
Oh ok, gotcha. I’m not trying to blame any entity here, just pointing out the price difference that’s larger than the sales tax difference between the EU and CA. Interestingly HK prices for iPhones are almost exactly California prices (within a couple of dollars) even though there is no sales tax in HK - that’s probably on Apple.
1917€ would be about $2262, and $1699 pre-tax would be about $1699*1.095=$1860 with tax, or about $402 more expensive.
I'm comparing retail pricing in France (with a 2-year EU warranty) to business pricing in the US (with a 1-year warranty). That comes out to 1949€ including VAT in France, or about $2299 USD, vs $1749 USD including Los Angeles/CA sales tax with business pricing.
Apple positions itself as being on the side of the consumer, and while they never really justified their soldered-down RAM (on laptops), one _might_ argue that it reduced failure rates. It's interesting that IBM discovered that soldering RAM to the individual compute modules in the Blue Gene/L (ca. 2004-2007) did improve reliability, in part because they had 2^16 modules in one cluster. I don't really buy that argument for laptop RAM, and especially not for SSDs, but I'm not sure if there's anything that can push back against Apple other than plain old competition, which they're trying to distance themselves from as much as possible, of course.
I did include CA sales tax (in Los Angeles) of 9.5%, vs the VAT-inclusive price in France/Germany/Italy, and the difference _after_ including those was about 30% higher in the EU. Germany was the lowest, probably because they temp. reduced their sales tax from 19% to 16%.
I can actually get a round-trip economy flight (pre-COVID and now) to LA just to buy a Mac mini, and save about $400. It's really.. unfortunate.
The most important feature of an M1-based Mac will likely be OS support into the distant future. I'm still using a 2012 rMBP, which was the first-gen retina version, and it's held up much better than any other computer I've ever bought, partly due to OS support into 2020. I imagine Apple will stand behind this new generation for a long time as well.
The new M1 SOCs max out at 16GB RAM, which seems like a major limitation, but the timing and latency of this integrated RAM is probably much better than what you could otherwise achieve. Meanwhile, improved SSD performance will probably have a larger impact on the whole system. I remember when I bought a 15k RPM hard drive ca. 2005 - it was like a new computer. Upgrading the slowest part of the storage hierarchy made the largest difference.
One slight disappointment in the Mac mini is the removal of two USB C / Thunderbolt ports and no option for 10G ethernet vs. the Intel model. An odd set of limitations in 2020.
Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge.
Any option in Euros is about 30% more expensive than buying the same in the US or Hong Kong (which is pretty crummy, but possibly related to taxes and the cost of doing business in the EU).
EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or Apple chooses to price their products however they want by region.
Same! Mid-2012 rMBP. Turns out I could upgrade the AirPort card with a used one from ebay for $20, as well as the SSD (although that was maxed out at 1TB with mSATA). Eight years later, it's still a good computer.