this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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I think these ARM chips are more expensive than we realize! Apple's egregiously high upgrade pricing on MacBooks sucks, and 8gb of RAM by default on the base model sucks as well, but it is likely to raise the average sale price of devices equipped with their chips. This has been known for some time, I feel.
I'll cut Samsung some slack since we don't know the unit cost of the Snapdragon chips, and they aren't likely to sell out of these devices right away even with competitive pricing because of the state of Windows on ARM. I'm excited to see how Linux support pans out on the next generation of non-Apple ARM notebooks, though; I think this is a chance for some manufacturers to take Linux more seriously, as Linux on ARM is actually not a terrible experience.
Or it is just corporate greed. Samsung would love to position something that is just okay into a premium price tier and not have to pay Intel. Sure they’re going to pay Qualcomm instead but you can bet that Qualcomm is giving some great introductory prices to their early partners.
For example Apple uses HBM instead of DDR5. They also give the CPUs heaps of L1/L2/L3 cache to avoid memory access as much as possible. And some of the stuff they do with flash memory is just as expensive.
That's the real reason Apple Silicon Macs cost so much and I'm more than willing to pay that price. But it's also the reason those Macs are so fast.
How does Qualcomm compare? I have no idea.
Unless something changed, I believe Apple is using LPDDR5 since the M2. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-introduces-m2-processor-8-core-cpu-10-core-gpu-up-to-18-more-performance