The Cost of Owning a MacBook
I’m typing this on my MacBook 13" (Late 2008), and you may know its successor as the 101, a machine which updated my computer’s internals but still used an almost identical chassis. The 101 was Apple’s last mostly-upgradeable laptop.
In the past eight years, I’ve done everything on my MacBook: finished school, wrote tons of code. Lots of graphics work in Photoshop; audio and video editing. I store over 40,000 scanned papers, notes, and textbooks from dental school, in addition to all of my videos, movies, music, and photos. It is my only machine.
This MacBook is great.
I understand my computer won’t live forever so, over the past year, I have closely watched the new MacBooks Pro go from rumored, to announced, to reviewed, to widely available. I have seen critiques of battery life, gratuitous thinness, port elimination, and memory maximums, and it is safe to say the general mood seems a bit less, uh, positive than I expected. John Gruber astutely picked up on this with his made-you-look post, which taught me to expect catastrophizing around any new MacBooks.
But here’s my point: only one article in the months and months of MacBook Pro coverage I’ve seen has picked up on an undercurrent. Only one piece has gotten at the heart of these complaints. You see, there is one theme behind the criticism of the new MacBook Pro, and I don’t think many of those who are complaining even realize what it is: money. That was what Vlad Savov at The Verge focused on here: The future of PCs and Macs is expensive.
Vanishingly few of the concerns above can not be addressed with money. Battery life? Buy a new computer as soon as processor improvements allow improved battery life. Fewer/different ports? Buy what you need to connect your new computer. RAM limitations? Buy a workstation. Buy buy buy.
Thing is, I find myself siding with the critiques more than the endorsements. In an attempt to clear up my unsettled feelings, I decided to take my emotions out and replace them with numbers: dollar amounts for what it used to cost to own a MacBook workhorse and what it will cost in the future.
MacBook, 2008
I tallied the initial cost of my beloved MacBook, then I added in all the power bricks, hard drives, RAM, and OS upgrades I’ve made to my MacBook since I purchased it:
01/2009 $1300 Purchased
01/2010 $44.99 5400RPM 250GB HD
01/2011 $95 8GB RAM upgrade
10/2011 $79 Apple charger
07/2012 $21.54 OS X 10.8
09/2012 $99 Apple battery
10/2012 $169.99 256GB 830 SSD
10/2015 $99 NuPower Battery
03/2016 $160.68 500GB 850 SSD
04/2016 $79 Apple charger
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01/2017 $2148.2 Total for 8 yrs
That’s every penny I’ve spent to purchase and then keep this thing running for eight years. That comes out to $22.38 per month. Remember that number.
Now, let’s buy a new MacBook Pro!
MacBook Pro, 2016
A 13" screen makes sense, I have one of those. 16 GB of RAM — I want to future-proof this as much as possible. A 500 GB SSD hard drive because that’s what I have right now. Touch ID on the Touch Bar, because I’m increasingly storing my entire life on my machine and Touch ID makes securing all this easy. Ok, so that comes to $2,355 (with tax) for a replacement MacBook Pro.
Hey! That’s not bad, all I have to do is get eight years out of that hardware. And you know what? Given how much processor advances have slowed, how amazing that screen is: I think that is doable. Except, well, two things: battery and storage.
How do you feel about spudgering out a glued-in battery after it dies (generally after about 1,300 load cycles, as I have needed two new batteries in my current 2008 MacBook). Well, I’ve opened up my share of iPhones and replaced batteries and screens, but even I don’t like that idea! Ok, pay Apple to do it. Battery costs for two replacements over eight years: $400. And you better hope that, after five years, when Apple declares your machine vintage and drops support for battery replacement, that you can pay a third party to do it. Cross your fingers they don’t bump the logic board, because everything is soldered on. Which brings me to my next point:
iPhones generate enormous amounts of data to which I have an intense emotional attachment. I’m referring, of course, to pictures and videos of my daughter. You really think that one soldered-in 500 GB hard drive is going to be able to store all the pictures and videos an iPhone 7 (shooting 4K?!) will throw at it for eight years?
This returns us to my thesis: owning these computers is becoming more expensive. I am going to set aside my ideology, my past experience of always upgrading all my computers, and accept this: admission to the Apple garden requires I give up my ability to upgrade. Taking that as fact, I will need a place to store many many gigs of videos, photos, and music.
What do you do when you run out of space on your laptop and you can’t upgrade it? You move to iTunes Match at $25/year and Photos storage to the cloud for about $240 a year. (A note on network attached storage: it is great for Plex streaming, mediocre for iTunes, and apparently borderline impossible for storing your macOS Photos library. You can buy a Mac mini and attach a storage array to it. This is not cheap. So, as much as I am loathe to state it this way, it really is all or nothing: all the benefits (and costs) of Apple, or none. Or, stop taking adorable videos of my daughter.)
$2355 Purchase MacBook Pro
$400 Two battery replacements
$1920 iCloud photo/video storage
$200 iTunes Match
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$4875 Total for 8 years
So this is what it looks like to be all-in on Apple: I can’t upgrade the storage on my device and so am faced with a choice. Do I give up all the conveniences of integration between devices using Messages, Photos, and iTunes and in exchange spend days of time to set up a real RAID 6 NAS with essentially unlimited storage? Or do I just pay more?
I still don’t know the answer to that question.
Monthly Cost of Ownership
2008 MacBook: $22.38 per month ($2,148.20 for 8 years)
2016 MacBook: $50.78 per month ($4,875 for 8 years)