The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.
$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.
Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.
I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.
Those L1 cache specs have to be wrong, right? Bigger L1 on the e core than p core seems like it has to be incorrect (unless the lower clock lets them get away with something?)
The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.
$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.
Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.
I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.
Those L1 cache specs have to be wrong, right? Bigger L1 on the e core than p core seems like it has to be incorrect (unless the lower clock lets them get away with something?)
I’m going to keep an eye out for the incoming refurb $200 M4s. Handy little machines to have as a low power tmux terminal.