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Apple's Low-Cost Colorful MacBook: All the Rumors
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Would would you expect from laptop these days? There is no revolutionary hardware available. It will be a quite inexpensive way to get macOS and that’s good in my book
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
I made no claim about expectations.
I was simply talking about the nauseatingly worn out overhype marketing speak in which Apple trades now, no matter whether a given product is deserving of it or not.
McTool
macrumors 6502
900 euro is not cheap.
I'm European so we include tax in the price tag unlike America
I'm European so we include tax in the price tag unlike America
That’s a shame. I’d love something the size of the 11” MBA again. I guess 12.5” is close enough.
JPack
macrumors P6
Nothing in Europe is cheap though, from high sales taxes to high utilities and gas prices. Most of it is self-inflicted.
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
That’s based on display size and installed RAM size. MacOS will keep more system stuff in RAM if available, but that stuff can also be swapped to disk without a noticeable performance hit until it comes time to search for files.
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
I don’t notice the notch because I use a 4k display as the main and the MBP screen as a second monitor where I keep mostly static pdfs.
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
I like the Island except landscape in browsers (Safari and others) seems to think it’s not there and buries content. All other apps in landscape work fine.
Mrkevinfinnerty
macrumors 68040
Sure, i don't think they can introduce something like this and not have it take sales from the Air. You hear people say they bought their kid an Air for school and i'm sure a lot of those kind of buyers will save their money and go for this now. Apple can probably make up for that by catching some switchers from midrange windows machines.
My guess is the MBA will be a better value overall though for those that can run to it.
G5isAlive
Contributor
so why not talk about what this thread is about, the rumored new MacBook? If you want to talk about capitalism, I am sure a lot of folks would be interested in a thread you started.
I have no real expectations either, I typically wait to see what is released. which I guess pot meet kettle, could be a thread of its own. And if no one speculated we wouldnt have MacrRumors... so.. but yeah, capitalism sells. go figure.
my guess is it will be a great travel laptop.
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AppleTO
macrumors 68000
It would be amazing if this actually ended up being $599 USD. That would make it around $799 CAD, which is nearly half the cost of the 13” MacBook Air. I’m not holding my breath though.
This could be great for students and move the edu market away from crappy Chromebook’s, but it’s fit to be £499 and not a penny more, otherwise it’s too close to MacBook Air territory.
Apple has been developing a more affordable version of the MacBook, and it's rumored to be launching in under two weeks. This is going to be one of Apple's most unique Macs, because there hasn't really been anything quite like it before.
We've rounded up everything we know about the low-cost MacBook ahead of its March debut.
Design
Rumors about the MacBook's design make it sound a lot like the MacBook Air. It will have an aluminum chassis in various colors, and a 12.9-inch or 13-inch display, depending on the rumor.
It's possible the low-cost MacBook will have a thin and light design because it's going to use a lower power A-series chip that doesn't require a lot of heat dissipation, but that's not yet confirmed. Apple used to have a 12-inch MacBook with a thin design and a low-power Core M chip, and it's been suggested that this new MacBook could be something of a revival of that machine.
Thinner and lighter typically means more expensive with Apple products, so a super slim design might not be what Apple is optimizing for. Making the low-cost MacBook thinner than the MacBook Air could just confuse the MacBook lineup.
With the low-cost iPad, Apple keeps the price down by using older display technology that's not as thin, so we could see that same strategy with the low-cost MacBook. A thicker chassis and a super efficient chip could mean a long battery life, which would be ideal for an educational environment.
Colors
The MacBook is going to come in a selection of fun colors, and Apple has tested light yellow, light green, blue, pink, silver, and dark gray, according to Bloomberg. Not all of those colors are likely to ship, but it sounds like we'll get at least four of them.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks the MacBook will come in yellow, silver, blue, and pink, which would be the same colors that Apple offers for the iPad.
A-Series Chip
The most consistent rumor we've heard about the MacBook is its planned chip. Rather than an M-series Mac chip, Apple is planning to use an A-series chip. The low-cost MacBook is expected to use the A18 Pro chip, which Apple first debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro.
The A18 Pro uses a second-generation 3-nanometer process. It has a 6-core CPU with four performance cores and two efficiency cores, along with a 6-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine for AI-based tasks. In Geekbench benchmarks, the A18 Pro has an average single-core score of 3451, and a multi-core score of 8572. For comparison, the M4 iPad Pro earns a single-core score of 3694 and a multi-core score of 13732 (Apple's next MacBook Air is going to use the M4 chip).
The A18 Pro outperforms the M1, which is the chip that Apple kept around in a lower-cost version of the MacBook Air for several years. An A18 MacBook wouldn't be too far off from the M4 Mac/iPad chips in terms of single-core performance, but there would be a difference in multi-core performance.
A MacBook with the A18 chip would be more than powerful enough for day-to-day use like web browsing, document creation, watching videos, and even light photo and video editing. It won't be ideal for system-intensive games or tasks like 4K video editing and 3D rendering, but it will do almost everything an iPhone or iPad can do.
Apple is developing the low-cost MacBook with students in mind, and it sounds like it will be the Apple equivalent of the affordable Chromebook PCs that are often used by students.
RAM
Macs start with 16GB RAM, but the iPhone 16 Pro has 8GB RAM, the minimum for Apple Intelligence. We can expect an A18 Pro MacBook to have at least 8GB RAM so it can support Apple Intelligence, but it's possible Apple will give it the 16GB that all Macs have.
Storage
The MacBook Air starts with 256GB of storage, but Apple could possibly launch the low-cost MacBook with 128GB.
Ports
The A18 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro models doesn't support Thunderbolt, so the MacBook will be limited to USB-C (10GB/s) and won't offer Thunderbolt speeds. That will limit display connectivity, so it's likely the A18 Pro MacBook will only support a single external display.
Naming
It's not really clear what Apple will name the low-cost Mac notebook. We have the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, so it's entirely possible it will be called "MacBook." Apple has used the MacBook name multiple times in the past, and it's not in use at the moment.
Price
Pricing on the MacBook Air starts at $999, and the low-cost MacBook is expected to be priced much lower.
Apple probably won't want to undercut its iPad pricing by too much. The low-cost iPad with A16 chip starts at $349, and the iPad Air with M2 chip starts at $599. A price between $599 and $799 could make the most sense because it wouldn't be as expensive as the MacBook Air or iPad Pro, but would come in at or just over the iPad Air's cost.
$599 would be on par with some of the highly rated Chromebook options that people often purchase for school use, while a $699 or $799 price would be in the same general pricing area, but a little more of a premium price tag. $599 is also the cost of the iPhone 16e, Apple's most affordable iPhone that uses a slightly less powerful A18 chip.
Launch Date
Rumors suggest that the low-cost MacBook will be introduced at or just before Apple's March 4 Special Experience that's taking place in New York, London, and Shanghai. Apple could announce the MacBook in a press release ahead of the experience.
Select members of the media have been invited to the mini event, and it's likely to provide them with a chance to try the new MacBook and other new devices.
Article Link: Apple's Low-Cost Colorful MacBook: All the Rumors
Astuces iOS
macrumors 68040
We will wait and see how it will handle macOS I guess…
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
Yes, ideally the 12GB A19 is the chip. Development was likely using the A18 but that is often the case, where development of a new model uses previous chips because new the target chip wasn’t in existence yet.
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
If you want this machine to have legs (as in, sell for a while without ANY changes) then the A19 is the way to go. It adds 2-3 years of sales life to the model, where an A18 would need to be replaced with an A19 offering anyway within 15 months.
If Apple wants to churn out these same machines for 2+ years and sell them for 3, with only new colors every year, it needs to be A19 now.
But if their plan is to update it more frequently then A18s are fine.
$599 M1 MBA out of stock at Walmart.
Will this new one be any cheaper and faster and better?
Will this new one be any cheaper and faster and better?
Bug-Creator
macrumors 68000
Ermmm...
stale Air vs. based Beauty
The Air was heavier, thicker, wider and just an hair shorter.
It was only 11" because it had even thicker bezels than the 12" rMP.
And you can't just go any smaller then those 2 without compromising the KBD which would bring it into Netbook territory.
Bug-Creator
macrumors 68000
Why?
If Apple wanted to they could sell an A18 based MacBook till 2030 and keep it supported till 2035.
Pretty much what they are doing with those A14x 😛 based MBAs today.
snipr125
macrumors 68030
Maybe your right, but at least we have better quality food though!
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Tagbert
macrumors 604
Are you talking about Safari on iOS? In my experience, it defaults to keeping the content area pulled back from the Dynamic Island and symmetrically on the other side in landscape mode. You can manually zoom in and then the content can extend into the island but it can also extend off the side of the screen. That’s expected if you zoom in enough.
CheesePuff
macrumors 68000
ikramerica
macrumors 68030
No, I don’t think they could without also introducing a newer model.
Apple doesn’t sell the M1 MBA. Walmart did. Not sure exactly how this worked, whether it’s a bulk order of old stock, special large volume runs for them, or what, but it hasn’t been sold by Apple for 2 years and it was a “replaced” by the M2 in 2022.
If Apple wants to sit on it for the longest time, they will use the A19. If they intend to upgrade it sooner, then the A18 works. But at this price point, the profit comes later. Upgrading it when it’s profitable cuts into the margins, but if it’s too long in the tooth it will end up a walmart special too soon.