I'm afriad you are going to need to get used to it.
The £ is depreciating against the dollar, and wages in the UK have been stagant for 10+ years and are set to remain stagant for another 10 based upon current forecasting.
Based upon current trends countries like Poland and Slovakia are going to overtake the UK on many economic metrics within a generation, which is both a credit to the growth of those countries and the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France, and the US.
Imports are going to just keep getting more and more expensive.
brexit was - from an economic suprarational viewpoint - obviously a non-forced error. the resentment that eventually got channeled into this populist surge is very real and stems from the same deepening inequality that plagues the US and other globalizing economies.
people scraping by outside London see the decades going by and their lot not improving, and eventually the busy beavers crafting messages found the right ones ("the UK is paying so and so much pounds every day to the EU instead of funding the NHS more")
this solved nothing, people scraping by still have low economic productivity. infrastructure development outside London is late by decades (because every time there was a cost increase it slowed down basically, and there were a lot of cost increases - every recession, interest rate cut, Baumol effect, etc meant costs going up)
similarly development inside big cities is stunted because of cost increases.
because a lot of globalization made local services relatively more expensive (this is the Baumol effect basically) and all the affected areas are very labor heavy: NHS (healthcare), education, construction.
then all this recently culminated in idiots getting elected (Boris Johnson, etc) who then made things worse by not doing anything.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-the-uk-is-having-an-ec... - in this paywalled post Noah argues that the UK is going through a mild version of the emerging economy crisis (like Sri Lanka), because its import dependent, trade deficit, capital flight, pegged currency (basically for price stability the Bank of England has to), and lots of borrowing in foreign currency (USD, EUR), and accelerating inflation
Totally agree regarding the UK, I was mostly trying to understand where the belief in the "lockstep decline" of the other countries (Germany, France, ...) comes from.
Apple products are produced in Chinese Special Economic Zones (SEZs), so they have to be technically imported into China if they are sold there, and are produced with machines and labor paid for in dollars.
The pound has gone to shit and the UK price includes VAT. Take away VAT and use current exchange rates and you are paying a $200 premium in the UK, so 10% above US price is actually a smaller difference than it has been in the recent past when the pound was $1.5 but the only difference between the two price lists was changing a $ for a £.
This is false. Apple adjusted price for products when exchange rates changed. They don’t do it daily, usually it happens at product releases like today.
I do get sticker shock at the prices, but I have to say I still use my 2015 MBP for dev work and it's been serving me well. That's quite the longevity... I'd hope if I got an M2 (thinking about upgrading in a year or two), that it lasts a similar duration. ~8 years, I wouldn't mind shelling out that price, especially since it pays me back so quickly (some consulting work).
Have to check to see how reliable those thinkpads are but I also just enjoyed the physical experience of a Mac (know it's not for everyone and subjective)
I used a 2013 MBP for work, and when work upgraded me to a 2019 MBP I kept the 2013 for myself.
Since then, the 2019 macbook has been having tons of problems, crashing, thermal issues, software issues, keyboard issues. But the 2013 has been working like a dream. My coworkers have many similar experiences.
Mid-2010s was definitely a peak for macbooks. Hopefully M1s/M2s will be another peak.
2019 MBPs unfortunately weren't great. I had horrible battery life issues after years of heavy use and got my work to replace it with a M1 max 16". Night and day difference, a huge huge step up. The thermal issues on the 2019 models were really ridiculous.
I run Turbo Boost Pro Switcher to help with the heat and disable it when I actually need the performance. It was crazy to hear the fan on this laptop-shaped room heater just go on and on while I was just working on code.
I ran thinkpads for years. There is a nice market for previous generation ones new in box with 3 year next business day warranties for stupid money. I got my daughter a 13 month old T495s for £600 for example. That’s still under warranty now.
But yeah I’ll bitch and moan and just give apple the money like I always do now n
A new Thinkpad x1 with an i7, 16gb ram and 1tb ssd is at £2400. And you cant get more than 16gb of ram. imho the MacBook Pro is not unreasonable expensive.
While the value of the £ has rebounded somewhat since a low in September, it is still much below what it was just a couple of years ago. Apple is basing it’s prices in USD and that has hit the £ and the Euro over the last six months or so.
Yeah, I get that it’s a reflection of the state of things but it doesn’t make it any less disheartening. I just expect every new generation of their products to come with a £100-400 price jump now.
Or, in the case of the iPads last time round, a price jump for the exact same product.
Edit: at this rate when my previous gen one expires I'm going to think seriously about shifting back to ThinkPads...