The fun thing is: even an A15 would be "good enough" for a lot of people as a daily driver. A15 is basically M2's little brother. And considering my M2 Air is basically hardly ever using its performance cores, even less more than two at the same time, the thing doesn't sound so ridiculous anymore. Yeah, I clearly could do 90% of my work on such a device and probably not notice it.
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Apple Tested a MacBook With the A15 Chip
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More than an iPad but cheaper than a MBAis my guess. Nice play to grab market share from students. If pricing is good, school districts could buy them en mass.
Could see this being used in education instead of chrome books. All my teacher friends hate them hahaha Mostly because everything is in the cloud and requires wifi but still the love isn't there.
A return to the education market was one of my first thoughts when first hearing about the A series powered MacBook. I would think the education market would also want some way of limiting what applications could be installed, but that won't necessarily translate to the consumer market.
One advantage with using the A-series chip the reduced power requirements with respect to the M-series. This would allow for a smaller battery which would reduce the cost.
Price will prevent that from happening. Chromebooks are in the $300 range.
The goal of this low-cost MacBook isn't to fight head-on with Chromebooks, but rather prevent erosion of the MacBook Air. There are currently far too many discounts on the $999 MBA.
Given the current RAM crisis, Apple might just be trying to resurrect 8GB Macs, allowing them to bump up the price of all the 16GB models without leaving a gap at the sub-£$1000 price point.
The rumors say that this is going to have a 12.9 inch display. Given that the earlier 12 inch display had fairly large bezels, it could be that the 12.9 inch would not be much larger in footprint. So this should be a nice, light device with plenty of power for every day use. They will sell a ton of them.
M-Series chips are just souped up A-Series chips. No reason to think Apple would try to lock down macOS if they haven’t already. I mean, people thought that when the iPad chips first came to Mac, and it didn’t happen.
A rumors by nature doesn’t have “credible”sources. It’s hearsay and an informant trades these rumors on their reputation if they have one. Their reputation is either boosted or lowered based on how right the rumors were after the facts are released.
That being said, the Apple silicon Developer Kit Mac mini ran plain vanilla macOS on an A12Z chip, so logically I can surmise that an A18/19-based MacBook whatever is going to run regular plain vanilla macOS with a reasonable expectation of certainty.
I have 2 devices with an A17 Pro. If Apple is going mask off on A series chips being perfectly capable of running Mac OS, they should give iPhones, iPads, and Vision the option to boot into MacOS already.
It’s embarrassing that Samsung is outdoing Apple in this department considering they don’t even have a desktop OS to work with.
It’s embarrassing that Samsung is outdoing Apple in this department considering they don’t even have a desktop OS to work with.
Considering MBA is practically selling at $750 with 16GB of Memory. I wonder how much would this new MacBook cost?
Even $699 with 8GB would be a rip off. But I just dont see how Apple intend to sell it at $599.
Much rather they do A18 with 12GB Memory and sell it at $699.
Even $699 with 8GB would be a rip off. But I just dont see how Apple intend to sell it at $599.
Much rather they do A18 with 12GB Memory and sell it at $699.
There is no fundamental difference in architecture. They use the same IP blocks (CPU, GPU, encoders, ANE). Just more or less of them. Roughly speaking you can use this rule of thumb (doesn't always work, but close enough) for CPU and GPU:
M is 2x A for GPU and big CPU cores, but not little CPU cores
M Pro is 2x M
M Max is 2x M Pro in terms of GPU, but not CPU
M Ultra is (literally) 2x M Max
The A Pro chips sit somewhere in between A and M, having more GPU cores and more system Cache.
A bit more in depth:
The architecture is the same, and maximum clock speeds also are the same. Thermal envelope, however, is very much constrained in mobile devices. But: An M4 in a MacBook Air also doesn't have the same thermal envelope as an M4 in a Mac Mini. So even same name chips aren't really Apples-to-Apples comparisons. And that's before factoring in that not all variants have all cores enabled (less GPU cores are common, the iPad Pro has an M4 with only 3 "big" cores, etc) due to binning.
Also do different chips have different memory busses. The same "double with each tier" metric *roughly* applies here as well. So bigger chips have wider memory, which means they can access more memory in less time, which is mostly interesting for GPU and ML.
Adding to that different chips may have different storage controllers, differing amount of Thunderbolt / USB IO, and display controllers.
So, TLDR: Apple is using the same IP blocks in a generation, yes, but they assemble different configurations with them. This is common industry practice.
Yup. There would be no purpose or advantage in this upcoming low-cost Macbook to run a lesser version of MacOS. A sufficiently powerful version of an A-series chip can run a full version of macOS just fine, though seemingly with an upper RAM limit that's much lower than the M-series chips, though that would be fine for most people who use low-end computers.
People in these forums constantly misuse the term "upsell". Upselling involves a seller actively trying to convince a customer to upgrade (whether or not it's in the customers best interest). Just having different packages at different price points for customers to choose from on their own is not upselling. That's just offering different packages. Each package is aimed at different customers with different needs.
What you and others may be accusing Apple of is something more like "captive product pricing", which is selling a product that requires add-ons to properly function (eg. cheap printers that require expensive ink cartridge refills), claiming that Apple's base configurations sound like good value but are "not enough" for most people. But that claim seems to go against the data (high sales of base configurations and overall high satisfaction rates).