Comment by embedding-shape
8 hours ago
Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of memory at enthusiast-compatible price?
The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!
Apple is not catering to minimum salaries in poor countries. Does this really need to be explained?
$3499 is definitely enthusiast compatible. That's beefy gaming PC tier, which is possibly the canonical example of an enthusiast market.
This isn't tens of thousands of dollars for top tier Nvidia chips we're talking about.
Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.
I'm an immigrant to Canada, and yes, English has both literal meanings and colloquial meanings.
In the most literal meaning, absolutely, "Enthusiast" just means a person who likes something, is excited about something.
When it comes to market and products though, typically you'll see the word "Enthusiast" as mid-tier - something like: Consumer --> Enthusiast --> Professional (may have words like "Prosumer" in there as well etc:)
In that context, which is typically the one people will use when discussing product pricing and placement, "Enthusiast" is somebody who yes enjoys something, but does it sufficiently to be discerning and capable of purchasing mid-tier or above hardware.
So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone or compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear. Equivalently, there are myriad gamers out there (on phones, consoles, Geforce Now, whatever:), an enthusiast gamer is assumed to have a dedicated gaming computer, probably a tower, with a dedicated video card, likely say a 5070ti or above, probably 32GB+ RAM, couple of SSDs which are not entry level, etc.
Again, this is not to say a person with limited budget is "not a real enthusiast", no gatekeeping is intended here; simply, if it may help, what the word means when it comes to market segmentation and product pricing :)
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$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc.
It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other stuff.
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An enthusiast in the hobby space is by definition someone willing to pour much more money that someone else not that enthusiast in whichever hobby we are talking about.
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For an individual making median income in the US, it would cost 2% of your income to get a machine like this every 4-5 years. That's a matter of enthusiasm, not a matter of having a lot of money. Sorry that income is less where you are, but the people talking about the product tier are using American standards.
1200$ as the minimum salary covers probably 70% of Europe by population?
The Neo has enough power to do small LLM testing and pretty much anything else a bit slowly, and costs $600?
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Did you need to add poor? Unless apple isn't catering to the US
I spent aaround that on my current personal desktop... 9950X, 2x48gb ddr5/@6000, RX 9070XT, 4tb gen 5 nvme + 4tb gen 4 nvme. I could have cut the cpu to a 9800x3d and ram to 32gb with a different GPU if my needs/usage were different. I'm running in Linux and don't game too much.
That said, a higher end gaming setup is going to cost that much and is absolutely in the enthusiast realm. "enthusiast" doesn't mean compatible with "minimum wage"
The original Mac with 128KB of memory cost $2,495 when Apple released it in 1984. It would be about 3x that in today's money.
I came here to say the same. Even with my student discount price of $1000, that's over 3K in today's dollars.
We are so freaking spoiled by the cheap cost of compute now.
> it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!
Enthusiast compute hardware doesn't cater to the people on the minimum salary in any country, let alone developing nations. When Ferrari makes a car they don't ask themselves if people on minimum salary will be able to afford them.
In in the bottom two poorest EU member states and Apple and Microsoft Xbox don't even bother to have a direct to customer store presence here, you buy them from third party retailers.
Why? Probably because their metrics show people here are too poor to afford their products en-masse to be worth operating a dedicated sales entity. Even though plenty of people do own top of the line Macbooks here, it's just the wealthy enthusiast niche, but it's still a niche for the volumes they (wish to)operate at. Why do you think Apple launched the Mac Neo?
Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper class enthusiasts" or something in reality then? I understood that to juts be about the person, not what economic class they were in, maybe I misunderstood.
Yes, it's a different definition.
Enthusiast in this contest more or less means you are excited enough about something to get a level above what normal people should get and just below professional pricing. An enthusiast camera body can be 2000 euros.
I would say an enthusiast computer is 2-4k.
It really depends what you meant with minimum salary (yearly?) because paying 3 months of salary for a computer like that isn't far fetched. You're not using this to generate recipes for cookies. An enthusiast level car is expensive as well.
enthusiasts in computer hardware assumes enthusiasm about hardware, not about "hardware on an budget". It doesn't matter if it's afforable or not.
>Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper class enthusiasts" or something in reality then?
Why? Enthusiasts are by definition people for whom value for money is not the main driver but top performance and cutting edge novelty at any cost. Affording enthusiast computer hardware is not a human right same how affording a Lamborghini or McMansion isn't.
But you don't need to buy a Lamborghini to do your grocery shopping or drive your kids to school, same how you don't need an Nvidia 5090 or MacBook Pro Max to do your taxes or do your school work.
So the definition is fine as it is. It's hardware for people with very deep pockets, often called whales.