I talked to several Apple employees at the Apple Stores and they said they barely moved the 11". It would be crazy to bring back such a loser machine.
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Apple Surveys 12-Inch MacBook Users for Opinions on Size, Features, and More
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I still use my original 2015 12" MacBook. It's a great machine for just doing casual stuff on the sofa and was perfect for carrying to meetings back when we still worked in offices. The form factor is perfect and I love the butterfly keyboard. Sorry haters 
(Battery life is about 30 mins now though.)
I love my M1 Air too. The power and speed is light years ahead of the 12" and it can even play Diablo 3 but it is bigger and heavier. Not something you can just scoop up in two fingers.
My early 2020 i7 Air is junk though. Slow, noisy and with a noticably poorer screen than the other two.
Would love an Apple-silicon reboot of the MacBook form factor. Preferably with Butterfly Gen 4 keyboard.
(Battery life is about 30 mins now though.)I love my M1 Air too. The power and speed is light years ahead of the 12" and it can even play Diablo 3 but it is bigger and heavier. Not something you can just scoop up in two fingers.
My early 2020 i7 Air is junk though. Slow, noisy and with a noticably poorer screen than the other two.
Would love an Apple-silicon reboot of the MacBook form factor. Preferably with Butterfly Gen 4 keyboard.
Shrink the bezels for a 12.5" display, the M1 chipset in, 128 or 256 GB fast SSD , 2 ports / 1 TB 3, weight under 1 kilogram!
Would immediately replace my iPad Pro 11 with Magic Keyboard!
Make it so, Apple!
Would immediately replace my iPad Pro 11 with Magic Keyboard!
Make it so, Apple!
I never understand this incessant need for thin bezels. It's so funny how Thinkpads have such very thick bezels and Thinkpad fans praise their screens. Apple's bezels aren't even thick in the first place. So silly.
Ditto. Mine from 2011 recently died on me, just a month or so shy of the 10 year mark! I was gutted.
I have just gotten a Lenovo Yoga 6 as my small and portable windows laptop (I always have one alongside my macs) and I honestly think anything below 13" is just too small for a computer...
13" already is, but considering I won't use this computer for my main productivity, I guess it's fine
13" already is, but considering I won't use this computer for my main productivity, I guess it's fine
I don’ t agree, perhaps that was the case with the intel based 13 inch MacBook, but since m1, it should be a lot easier to build a relatively simple and cheaper 12 inch MacBook . The old 12 inch Mackbook had very expensive terrace shaped batteries to use every inch for acceptable battery life . With m1 , they could use a smaller, regular shaped battery. The m1 can be placed in the chin of an iMac. Without a battery , I know, but with a cooling system, and in an 11 inch iPad Pro, with a regular and thin battery.
the 11 inch MacBook Air was also cheaper than its bigger brother.
Well, as a former 12” MacBook owner and owner of an iPad and iPhone I respectfully disagree.
I would probably agree IF my iPad ran MacOS rather than IOS.
but my 900 gram MacBook was an awesome travelling laptop for work.
I used 12 Macbooks for years and still have the last i7 model, it is/was the only true go-anywhere travel Mac. Both the M1 Air and M1 MBP are far too clunky and heavy by comparison. I'd buy an M1 version like a shot!
This really will be the conundrum for Apple. And I am a bit pessimistic.
The 12" MacBook, from what I understand, was Jonathan Ive's baby, he pushed Apple to build it. For better or worse.
Now with both Jobs and Ive gone, I sense Apple is more and more recycling old ideas for the lack of new ones. And in areas where they really need new ideas and visions - none come. E.g. home automation, Apple TV/HomePod strategy. They just do more and more of the same they did in the past.
Even the new iMac needed input from Ive supposedly - and even then it is just a small regurgitation of past ideas. Also the new iPad and iPhone designs are merely variations of the iPhone 4. Not really anything new.
That being said, the main problem with the 12" MacBook was, that people assumed smallest size = cheapest price, looking for the ultimate cheap Mac. But miniaturization is expensive, the smaller you go, the more creative/expensive you will need to become. Unless you jump the evolution with radically new technology (think holographic virtual displays), though I bet the first such devices will also be -very- expensive, albeit really small.
Apple would have needed to advertise the 12" MacBook to the corporate ultra-portable crowd, but for this market, these machines probably needed more storage and memory and more ports. Which Apple did not want to use, probably mostly out of fear to cannibalize their high-end MacBook Pros. Or their high-end iPad Pros. Or both.
I think Joni Ive pushed Apple to release the 12" MacBook, because Ive understood what magic it was.
But the 12" MacBook was -never- a cheap iBook replacement. Never.
Yet people assumed it was. And Apple never corrected that general sentiment out of stupidity, or out of a misunderstanding of what the product really was, or out of fear it would cannibalize sales of other products that have higher profit margins (MacBook Pros or iPad Pros).
Unless Apple can figure this conundrum out, it will never know what to do with another 12" MacBook.
Rebirthing it as an iBook replacement will not make the original users happy, I am afraid.
This is exactly the point in time where the Apple laptop strategy went bust.
I bet (my conjecture) that at the time the 12" MacBook was introduced Apple intended to get rid of the 'Air' moniker and go back to MacBook and MacBook Pro naming.
But since their marketing did not realize that the MacBook Air was mostly the "cheap student laptop" and the higher priced 12" MacBook was too expensive for many, the 12" did not sell as well as Apple hoped, in order to replace the Air. So they were stuck keeping the 13" Air around.
Consequently the 'Air' moniker still had marketing power amongst students, and Apple could never get rid of it - lest they waste a perfectly marketable name.
They should have just called the 12" MacBook the '12" MacBook Air' and opened a new line of light laptops with it, as Jobs probably intended.
But without Jobs, no one picked up on that original marketing strategy and they got stuck in an ill-advised return to the 'MacBook' only name - resulting in the complete 'MacBook', 'MacBook Air' and 'MacBook Pro' mess we have today.
I'm a long time Mac user and the 12" has been my absolutely favorite Mac thus far. I switched to a 13" Pro for a couple years and recently rediscovered how wonderful the size and weight of that 12" is. I was trying to hold out for the next redesigned MacBook/Air but my older 12" was just not keeping up. I picked up an M1 Air last month. Incredibly fast and a joy to use. Now if I could just get this power and keyboard in that smaller, lighter form factor 🤩🤞
The 11" MacBook is thicker than the 12" MacBook because of the terraced battery.
I am sure Apple could do an M1 12" MacBook without the expensive terraced battery, but it would then just be a 12" MacBook Pro design, blockish, not tapered, meaning the keyboard would not be at a slight angle, making it less comfortable to type.
Not sure I would want a blocky 12" MacBook Pro design...
I'd rather pay extra for the tapered look with an expensive terraced battery.
yeah, me neither. it had such a poor cpu-performance compared to the rest of the laptop-lineup...
but now with m1 and newer iterations of apple silicon? imo it suddenly makes sense again. imagine a mbair 11 or 12" model, and mbpros starting at 14". so there would finally be a significant difference between the air and pro lineup: the air would be really light again, and the mbpros could dissipate heat much better because of the fans and bigger chassis and have a more powerful variant of an m-chip inside.
This doesn't necessarily mean Apple's putting out another 12" machine, only that they're interested in what their 12" customers want and why they might have chosen that tiny little laptop.
The 12" Macbook was thinner and weighed less than an iPad and Magic Keyboard. The iPad is nice on its own, and the MK makes it flexible as a mixed use device, but if what you want is a laptop then purpose built is going to win.
The 12" Macbook was thinner and weighed less than an iPad and Magic Keyboard. The iPad is nice on its own, and the MK makes it flexible as a mixed use device, but if what you want is a laptop then purpose built is going to win.