Do you think 15 inch Macbook Air exist (at least partly) to upsell the 14 inch Macbook Pro?

[Oneechan69]

There are now a whole price and feature ranges in Macbooks like there are with iPads, where the price of a new iPad Air with 256GB of storage is closed to an iPad Pro. Same thing with Macbooks now, at least sort of: The 15 inch Macbook Air at $1299 and the 14 inch MBP at $1599, slightly smaller screen but with the pro name, 120Hz refresh rate, more ports, and all the other features. Sounds like an upsell to me.

 

[neo_cs193p]

IMO, the 13" and 14" are small laptop displays, while the 15" and 16" are big laptop displays.

The 15" MBA is targeted towards people who know they want a big screen, but don't need every drop of performance and don't want to pay 16" MBP money.

Cross-shopping the 14" and the 15" is for people who like feature check-lists, and don't really care about the size of their laptop's display. Just look at all those fancy pro features, guess a small screen will do.

Just a thought, could be wrong of course.

 

[1096bimu]

No because it costs a LOT of money to design and setup production for a brand new CNC aluminium laptop chassis.

There are a lot of people who don't know what 120hz is, never plug anything in their computer, but want a big screen laptop.

 

[dasjati]

All this “overlap“ people like to complain and wonder about here in the forums is a best practice for businesses of any kind. You offer a “ladder“ of products, with nice easy steps between them. So, yes, one reason is to have something to offer at different price points.

Even more importantly, a MBA 15" and a MBP 14" serve different purposes and different customers. Case in point: I own a MBP 14" (M1 Pro) right now and I'm in the market for the MBA 15". How and why? Because I realized I want a more powerful desktop than the MBP 14" (I used it in clamshell mode most of the time) and I want a more portable laptop than the MBP 14".

Therefore, I've already bought a refurbished M2 Max Mac Studio. That machine is awesome. I expected it to be quieter than the MBP, but I didn't expect it to be silent even under continued load. Amazing little box. I'm glad I went for it.

I could have gotten a MBP with the same specs, but a) they are louder under load, b) the thermals are generally much better with the Mac Studio and c) less pieces that can fail. I was getting concerned about the health of the components of my MBP when it ran warm so often and was being used all the time for everything. Elements like battery, keyboard, track pad, hinge, display are separate or don't exist in the first place with my Mac Studio.

Now I'll keep my MBP 14" around until the M3 MBA 15" shows up and then I will exchange it for that one. Sure, the MBA looks worse on paper. But it will be better in real life for me and my use cases.

So, yes, I “know“ what 120hz is and I still don't care enough. I also don't need the ports on my secondary computer and if it has to stand in for my Mac Studio at some point, I'll just connect it via USB-C to my Dell monitor and I have all the ports I need. Also the M3 has plenty of power for a lot of tasks. The difference in display resolution between MBA and MBP is irrelevant for me. And so on.

I'm glad Apple finally makes a 15" MBA!

 

[Spock]

Yes, that is the reason that I have a 14 inch MacBook Pro and not the MacBook Air. By the time I added upgraded memory and SSD I was within a few hundred of the Pro that has more I/O, better display and faster processor.

 

[GaryGnu]

And that's the reason I have a 15" Air. The additional features on the pro weren't worth the extra money, and a 14" is too small, no matter how much better the video performance is. I rarely watch videos on my laptops, their work machines, so it's IDEs loaded most of the time. Macbook Pro video isn't a "must-have" feature for me. I've never compared the 15 to the 14 because I will never buy anything smaller than a 15" screen.

I get that I'm the odd one out, since 11's and 13's are hugely popular and most laptops seem to come in those small sizes, but they don't work for me and my situations. And while I accept I'm in the minority, we are a sizable minority that want/desire/need larger laptop screens. We're who the 15" Air is for, not for you. And that's fine. Buy what you want/need/desire. But please, can some of you just accept that some of us want/need/desire something different; whatever our reasons might be.