zlacker

You mean it’s possible to buy the exact equivalent of a M1 MacBook Air for £99-£249?

Send me the link, that sounds amazing.

>>mattke+(OP)
Yeah, the M1 MBA was really so out of the norm in terms of value that it's pretty much impossible to find anything like it at the price point. It literally turned me into an Apple person, essentially overnight. I no longer even switch on my windows machines.

>>mattke+(OP)
Not sure where you got the impression of that?

There do not exist "equivalent"s to any Apple devices (I don't see them licensing the M1/2 chips to anyone else anytime soon). But depending on what you care about, a "comparable" Apple device could be 10x more expensive. Of course, for other tasks a "comparable" Apple device can also be _cheaper_ than any non-Apple device available!

Only looking at aiming for similar "longevity" (since the parent is using that as a benchmark), there are plenty of devices that have a useful life comparable to Apple devices at 1/4 - 1/10 the price.

>>jabban+16
I'd love to see your 10x example.

>>tverbe+za
There is one above in the server/homelab space. Items like memory and storage are charged huge markups* so if you need a lot of capacity of those you are going to quickly get into the 10x range!

As for longevity, if you consider software support ending as EoL, software/OS support for a huge swath of Intel iMacs (especially those with DGPUs) was dropped by Apple quite a few OS releases ago and you have to run community patches to keep them working. Whereas similar decade old hardware still run Win 10 and Linux out of the box.

*: Don't get me wrong though, the markups are for good reason. x86 platforms don't offer anything close to Apple's ARM chip memory bandwidth (which are closer to DGPU levels). Similarly, for flash/SSDs.