If it is getting the M2 Pro then it will have a fan. I’m guessing it would be about 3 lbs. and be called a MacBook Pro. If it is getting an M3 then it will be fanless, probably weigh under 2.5 lbs. and be called a MacBook. I’d prefer the latter, but can see a case for either.
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Apple's Rumored 12-Inch MacBook Could Be Pro Model With M2 Pro and M2 Max
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What's the conflict? Unless you are asserting ALL people need the exact same thing. I'm willing to trade some battery life to get better performance in a much more portable device as a lot of my mobile work is done in short bursts with tight deadlines between other events and more sustained time at the keyboard is usually done tethered to a desk where I have power. Someone else may value longer battery life in a device with a bigger screen and not care so much about the performance as long as it was decent.
The hypothetical device you described doesn't serve anyone that just needs a smaller laptop. An updated 12" MacBook (Pro or not) would fit this need perfectly and find a market already waiting for it. What you described is an iPad-style hybrid that offers really no advantages over an existing iPad which already doesn't work well in the use cases where people just want a smaller MacBook. I do agree that cellular connectivity in MacBooks is long overdue.
At this point, why even have a regular old Macbook? I'm guessing most people wanting to spend less money on a Mac notebook would get the Air anyway, or an iPad if they want to spend less than $1K. For a sub $1K laptop just make a cheaper Air suitable for basic web browsing, streaming, office type apps etc.
After thinking about this a little bit this may be Apple's answer to low yields on the Pro/Max chips. They can make a new product that utilized chips with fewer cores. They they can pull from an inventory of binned chips with fewer working cores and market them as energy efficient M2 Pros. The performance will probably land somewhere between an M2 and M2 Pro with all the cores firing. Perhaps they could even slide one of these into the 13" MacBook Pro for those corporate buyers that still want it.
Well, if Apple manages to differentiate the segments it would make sense. The Air is meant to be a quick use ultraportable and the MacBook is the Mac for the average person. However, the segmentation has become warped with the M-Series chips. Now Airs are quite powerful.
For instance, you might get a binned down M2/M3 Air and make it cheaper and entice more users to the Mac ecosystem while leaving the MacBook as what the Air is now.
The point is that the Air IS NOT an ultraportable and NEVER WAS, except for the 11” which was never the best-selling Air.
Not that Air did not have dignity, but it is evident that certain segments of consumers have limits: they understand only economic or non-economic. With these it is useless to compare, the only requirement is to take as much money as possible from him.
The Air is therefore the cheap Mac, and the 12” could be something else, as has already happened since 2017.
Yes it is, that was why Apple made it. Heck, that's how Steve introduced it to the world. That's the reason it's 11" brother came along.
Just because it has powerful hardware doesn't mean it's not meant as an ultraportable.
People forget that the "Air" started as a premium product and the basic MacBook was a plastic entry-level machines that were previously iBooks before the switch to Intel. The original MacBook Air was the first computer to use the UltraBook reference design and it took a few years for Intel to get their act together. People (me included) paid a premium for portability and sacrificed performance to get it. Sooner than most people expected almost every new MacBook was an ultrabook. But the fewer ports, no optical drive, wedge shape, and other spec limitations that made the original Airs possible made them cheaper once all MacBooks were effectively ultrabooks. People that were budget conscious gravitated to the Air because it was the cheapest MacBook and it was nearly as capable as the Pros. Then Apple confused the lineup even more by reintroducing the MacBook name on device that was more inline with the original Air by being premium priced and ultraportable compared to to other MacBooks.
No, it never was.
Steve said so many things: he said that a screen under 13” makes no sense, too bad he produced it for decades before and after this statement, from 12” and even 11”.
It’s not an ultraportable for one simple reason: it was bulkier than a 13-inch MacBook Pro, in fact it was the dumbest item ever created by Apple, and the 11” was even dumber because it tried to compete with netbooks when it was evidently another product.
Ultraportables are built differently from the Air: they make weight and size their focus, and they cost a lot, because miniaturization is paid for.
The Air is quite the opposite: it’s a laptop made in economy with what’s left of expensive laptops.
The much mistreated 12-inch MacBook did at least one thing right: it was more portable than an iPad but it had MacOS, look a little exactly what iPad owners (and even iPad Pro that cost enormously) want.
Performance in an ultraportable is measured in grams and centimeters (or ounces and inches), not Ghz.
And there you have one of the reasons for which the 12" has flopped and was subsequently retired.
No, the reason is that people are stupid and understand only economic and not economic. And he campaigned against the product for the single usb-c port: wait, but which product today costs $2,000, has a 12.9” screen, and has only one usb-c port? Oh yes, that amazing product that everyone dreams of with MacOS and that they call iPad Pro, to which they also add a $400 keyboard, resulting in a heavier, more expensive and less powerful product than an Air. Absolute geniuses, some people can't fool them!
I believe that the era of ultraportables is over, and if Apple proposes them again it is because, as usual, it does not know where to go to get money, it is a commercial stunt, she no longer believes it anymore. Some products have been strongly desired by Ive, the 12” MacBook, the ceramic Apple Watch Editions, are produced by designers for designers, not for ordinary people, it is like art, it is appreciated by those who at least make the effort to try to understand it.
It’s not that the Air, the iPad Pro are useless products and the 12” would be the masterpiece: everyone theoretically would have its own function, but Apple has stopped trying to teach something, it only makes products whose purpose is to fill niches. Otherwise the successor to the 12-inch would be an iPad Pro with MacOS and a working keyboard that clutter, weigh less than a 12-inch MacBook, and perform twice as much as an Air.
But do you know what the problem is? Who buys MacBook Pros the most if the iPad Pro works so well? And you know what happens if people buy an iPad to use it like a MacBook Pro? Who then wants to do the same things about it. And you can’t do them, because the MacBook Pro weighs 3 times and has a cooling system that the iPad Pro will never have. So what interests do we Apple have in having an iPad Pro with MacOS? None. We sell an iPad Pro that tries, at the cost of a MacBook Pro, and we also sell MacBook Pros. That’s it, that’s the strategy.
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It flopped because of performance. Even the original Air would had suffered the same fate had Intel not come through with better CPUs on a newer process. The premium price was not the issue and if you paid for the better M7 processor in the BTO model, it wasn't a terrible computer. Even the keyboard or single port wasn't the deal breaker everyone thought it would be. It just never saw the exponential performance gains the Air saw after its first few years on the market. This is an area where I believe Apple Silicon can make a different.
As you stated, the MacBook used to be the entry level product, but since it was gone the market segmentation for Apple deviated and the MBA became that.
However, the Air was in part of Apple's response to netbooks/ultrabooks of the time.
Look, netbooks were toilets. The worst of Apple products doesn't suck as much as a netbook, you don't do anything about it with a netbook, other than losing but your eyesight.
And no, ultrabooks are something else from an Air. I can understand the first Air of 2008, but the others can't. You want an ultrabook to compare, get a Sony. A Sony X-505 or later. Those are ultrabooks. The Air ultrabook was perhaps in 2008 when they made a MacBook Pro thin, but it was an attempt to make laptops thin, not an ultrabook. They tried again with the 12” MacBook, an attempt to make a portable Mac small and thin, but Intel chips sucked, but it’s tradition: they always sucked.
agreed that netbooks were toilets and even Jobs sent jabs at them during the MBA's presentation. He said that Apple doesn't make junk.
However, the MBA was a response to the demands of the people for ultraportables. There is no arguing that point.
In 2008, when the MacBook line came in aluminum unibodies, that wasn't an ultrabook approach. It was making the MacBook line stand out and make it take a leap forward in engineering. Furthermore, the entire Mac line got that good because back then with Penryn chips, Apple could add the 9400M/9600GT combo which pushed computing further at great thermals. Intel chips back then didn't suck. They excelled as Intel was trying to come back from the Pentium fiascos and AMD pouncing Intel with Athlon.
Intel sucking came courtesy of a pre-Ryzen market with Intel becoming complacent after the 5th generation Core iX.
I was a PowerPC guy: Intel sucks. I had Centrino when Apple produced G4: the only way to make them work seriously was to put a Linux distro on it, meanwhile the G4, which as specifications should have been scarcer, gave it 3 turns, so much so that my G4s still run, the Centrino/Centrino Duo lie to take dust.
The netbook answer at 4-10X the price. It was an answer to everyone that was suffering the netbook experience for ultra-portability. But I think Apple's position was that netbooks were crap and here is a real computer in that same footprint. I paid a smidge under $2K for my first MacBook Air in 2008 and about the same for my first 12" MacBook 7 years later. It wasn't until about 2011 that MacBook Airs were cheaper than the MacBooks because the plastic MacBooks were discontinued and the aluminum MacBook became the 13" MacBook Pro a couple years before. I think Apple would have done better to just call them MacBooks and to let the Air name die like they did with the iPad Air name for a few years and just bring it back when they had a product that fit the Air's spot in the lineup. That way they could have just reintroduce the 12' MacBook as the new MacBook Air and everyone would have known what it was about.
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I still have my 2003 model!! I don’t use it but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid.
I have the MBA 11” but it died on me last year and I finally took it in for repair.
I would love for a 12” MacBook/Pro to be released. I like my current 2020” Intel Pro model, but I wouldn’t say not to a smaller model.
I am inclined to believe Apple might offer a base 12" MB but, I don't believe this rumor. Granted, I would like to be proven wrong but, I don't think I have to worry about that.
The 12" PowerBook was a classic. 4:3 aspect ratio! I almost bought one but chose the 15" at the last minute. Of course, this was about 2 months before they announced their switch from PowerPC to Intel processors along with the first "MacBook Pro". Many, including myself, felt the new name was a downgrade from PowerBook.
I used it for three years running Office, virtual machines and even doing some light programming.
If you know how to use Spaces in macOS it helps a lot.
Moving to ARM was the final nail in that coffin. What am I supposed to do with all those GPU cores? I can't play any games with them.
I get more mileage streaming my desktop or games to my MacBook Air.
Before the pandemic loused up business travel, I used to travel a lot. A lot. The 12" MacBook was just about perfect for my needs. It was light enough that I frequently would have to confirm whether or not I had, in fact, brought the machine along. Only problem was the battery life, as I could barely eke out three and a half hours from the thing. Back in 2015 and 2016, as the rumors about Apple bringing mac OS to the Arm architecture percolated, I prayed for them to be true. Getting 12-14 hours out of a thin-and-light business notebook, while also being able to plug it into a desktop environment using Thunderbolt 4, would be a dream come true.
I have been dying to know if the 15" MacBook Air machine is real. Because that would be by far the ideal machine for me.
I am interested in getting a new 13.6 M2 MBA, but would really prefer a ~15" MBA with M2/M3 (no pro or max necessary for me)... But I don't want to wait for something that doesn't come.
what do people here think? are the rumors true?