What would a cheap, Apple A18-powered MacBook actually be good at?
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My expectation is the same chassis and screen as the M1 Macbook Air, just with the M1 swapped out for the A18 because it became more of a pain to be the main company on an aging node than to just update it. It's the iPhone SE model of parts bin amortized components, I don't say that in any pejorative way.
Main question here is 8 or 16GB
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Apparently the M4 iPad Pro had a 12GB chip but only 8GB was enabled. Some thought it would be enabled later and reserved for AI but it never was. Might have not wanted to show up macs with 8GB M3s at the time.
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Demand, which for iPhones, is a much bigger driver of price than costs.
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If you already have an M1, then you are not really the market for this device. This is for someone with an older Mac, a PC, or just someone that needs a computer. Just because Apple might be updating what it offers for sale doesn't require everyone to upgrade.
A lot of people are still rocking their Intel-based MacBook Airs. An A18p Air would be a significant upgrade for them. Apple has also found a lot of success with selling the older M1 Airs in third-party channels at a reduced price. That brings a lot of new Mac users into the fold. Apple is probably interested in being able to make those sales themselves with this new device.
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That will end in 2027. Apple is in the process of kicking Qualcomm to the curb with the introduction of their own C1 modem in the iPhone 16e.
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Same, it still feels fast and snappy. I'm anticipating another 5+ years from this before I notice it feeling slow for what I do. This will easily be the best value laptop I have ever purchased as the lifespan seems so long.
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At one point in history Apple dominated education. They had iMacs, eMacs and iBooks/Macbooks in schools all over. That lead to mind share with future users and with the release of the iPod and then iPhone helped make it the success it is.
Today few schools use Apples. Most use commodity chrome books. And often those are horrid under optimal cirumstances.
If Apple could release a Mac OS driven product in the same cost point exclusively for Education it could substantially help Apple regain that market.
Today few schools use Apples. Most use commodity chrome books. And often those are horrid under optimal cirumstances.
If Apple could release a Mac OS driven product in the same cost point exclusively for Education it could substantially help Apple regain that market.
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What would the benefit would be for Apple? I doubt their production costs vary an extraordinary amount for the A18 vs the current low-end chips that they are putting in Macs. Unless they want the profit margins to be very low, they would have to cut costs elsewhere as well--such as memory, SSD capacity, materials, build quality, etc. The latter two probably don't make sense because then you're talking about sourcing new materials they don't currently use and designing and building new manufacturing lines that don't currently exist.
Meanwhile, < 16 GB of RAM makes for a really subpar user experience, particularly in our new Apple Intelligence world and tiny SSDs are the bane of any IT person's existence who has had to support an end user with a large photo library and no idea how inadequate 128 GB is.
The reason Apple hasn't competed in the super-budget market is because super-budget laptops are ... just crappy. The way Lenovo, HP, and Dell hit those price points is by cutting corners that Apple hasn't historically cut. Have you ever used a Lenovo IdeaPad or a Dell Inspiron 3000? The screens suck, they're bulky, the battery life sucks, and they're slow as crap--some of these still ship with 4GB of RAM!
If Apple did that, they would make very little profit per unit. It might bring some new people into the Mac ecosystem, but their first experience would be a crappy one.
Meanwhile, < 16 GB of RAM makes for a really subpar user experience, particularly in our new Apple Intelligence world and tiny SSDs are the bane of any IT person's existence who has had to support an end user with a large photo library and no idea how inadequate 128 GB is.
The reason Apple hasn't competed in the super-budget market is because super-budget laptops are ... just crappy. The way Lenovo, HP, and Dell hit those price points is by cutting corners that Apple hasn't historically cut. Have you ever used a Lenovo IdeaPad or a Dell Inspiron 3000? The screens suck, they're bulky, the battery life sucks, and they're slow as crap--some of these still ship with 4GB of RAM!
If Apple did that, they would make very little profit per unit. It might bring some new people into the Mac ecosystem, but their first experience would be a crappy one.
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I'm interested to see if the A18 would move the needle on battery life. Phone sized power draw with Mac sized battery, 36 hours on a charge would be a big selling point for many.
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We will have to see how quickly they transition to their own modem from the Qualcomm one. I have a 16e because it was basically free after trade in on T-Mobile from my 12 mini and I have no problems with the modem/wifi in it. Might not yet match the Qualcomm on the spec sheets but it seems to work just fine.
Performance wise I don't think An A18 would be a problem. My 16e seems really fast for a phone and would be fine for basic computer usage. As other people noted the bigger question would probably be base ram and storage. Only having 8gb of ram/256gb would be a bit limiting and probably cause problems for Apple Intelligence features but maybe that will be part of the branding as the inexpensive MacBook SE. Upgrade to the Air or Pro if you want Apple intelligence. If you just need a browser, cloud stuff and basic computer stuff the SE is fine.
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I think that’s the proposition for this rumoured device. It’ll be fully compatible with the latest MacOS/iOS versions, get a minimum of 5 years support, perform better than the M1 (it might be significantly better than the M1 given its going to have more thermal headroom in a laptop chassis instead of a phone one) and be less expensive than the other options. For someone coming off Intel and on a budget it would still be a massive upgrade.
The talk of colours makes me wonder if this is the return of the iBook?
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Education market, high schools in particular. A large high school will be ordering 400-800 per year; they can't sort through the availability tab on the refurbished site twice/day hoping there are enough. And their students would revolt if they were given "used" machines they were expected to keep for 4 years.
From Apple and TSMC perspective it would help with eliminating the M1 and M2 and moving toward an M4 and to-be M5 in that product line, boost the total runs of the A18, and keep them from having too many small-niche processors on the line.
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That ship sailed a long time ago and now G Suite is just too entrenched. A manager here was complaining that we are hiring young people who somehow got through K-12 and University without ever learning Microsoft Office, a skill she regarded to be as perfunctory as wiping one's own ass.
Most of the Mac people we have hired over the last half dozen years have come from K-12 and simply never wanted to see another Chromebook as long as they lived.
They all told similar stories as to how Apple lost their districts, some involve Mac OS X Server and some don't and all involve budget pressures and Apple being annoying to do business with relative to vendors like Lenovo.
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Apple won't likely ship them with even longer battery life. The power advantages of the A* SoC will be used to have a smaller/lighter/cheaper battery.
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lil bit of both? a bit similar to iphone and ipad with more diversely spread poverty, plebs, and bougie models eventually ended up with higher price for the mid-tier ...
also, it's possible that apple might want some viable (besides massive discount) to claw back some of the sale lost to chromebooks, for students...
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That would mean a new form factor. The consensus here seems to be that they will recycle the Air form factor for this use. Which seems silly when you consider Apple's previously irrational obsession with thin/light now they have an opportunity to make a great thin/light device with no compromises (like battery life or Bendgate). Personally I'd be OK with a recycle of the 12" MacBook form factor, now with double+ the battery life of the Intel version.
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It does support external screens, I have just plugged it into the Studio Display.
Maybe it does not support the native 5K/6K resolution of those displays and that’s why it is not listed there.
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Yes, good point about scanners. That raises another issue, with regards to the phasing out of the Rosetta2 X86 translation layer; how many scanners currently in use on Macs have ARM64 drivers? (My Epson scanner doesn't...)
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To be fair, those activities are a masterclass in what not to do without having a generous amount of RAM. And that goes double if she’s using Google Chrome.
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We have a few ancient scanners that cost as much as a car when they were new still running on G4 Mac minis and a large format scanner running on a Core 2 Duo PC that are all airgapped. Someone has a personal negative scanner that is from 2000 or so that she uses with a Pismo G3 on Mac OS 9.
There is no business case to replace serviceable hardware with functionally identical and expensive replacements when a USB stick can move a TIFF or PDF off those boxes just fine.
I wonder about the ScanSnaps though, people hate the new ScanSnap software and have been using the older ScanSnap Manager. That is an Intel only application that won't make the jump.
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No idea, but 24 GB Macs likely have 2x12 and 36 GB Macs have 3x12 GB.
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Good for: Giving Apple space to let the Air price to drift to higher elevations.
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Yeah. On older industrial hardware it's not uncommon to have some ancient PC connected to it to run things. No point in replacing a $100k or $1M piece of hardware that still does it's job because some PC is getting old. If it still does what it needs to do it will keep getting used for ages.
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Because Thunderbolt is (or was) backwards-compatible with Firewire. With an adapter, your old Firewire (or i.link) hardware is fully usable on a modern Mac. So if you had an $80,000 digital processing device running on Firewire, or a digital audio studio you've built up piece by piece over the past 30 years that connects to Logic via Firewire, up until Tahoe, it all still "just worked". And starting with Tahoe, it just doesn't.
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Some of this article seems kind of bizarre. For 90%+ of what the average person does, even a phone chip is WAY overpowered.
I have a Toshiba laptop from 2010 -- 4 gigs of ram! -- running Xubuntu and can do audio & video work (1080p-only), and run an old Gimp & Blender on it for image creation & manipulation. Hell, you can do more than that on a crappy chromebook.
I have a Toshiba laptop from 2010 -- 4 gigs of ram! -- running Xubuntu and can do audio & video work (1080p-only), and run an old Gimp & Blender on it for image creation & manipulation. Hell, you can do more than that on a crappy chromebook.
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I wonder if middle/high schools would be interested in this kind of offering to replace Chromebooks? At my daughter’s school, they learned GarageBand but had to do it in school only because the school had issued them Chromebooks…
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We have an old AV rack to go with a giant library of old tapes, there has been some weirdness using the old Firewire interface over Thunderbolt starting around macOS Monterey. Out of sync audio mostly but some video glitches too.
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williamlondon
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Oh good god, yes Apple has "bean counters" who want to maximise profits, welcome to fucking capitalism, but in your delusional world not another single corporation does the same thing. FFS, your anti-Apple trolling is tedious and so utterly childish.
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I'll be surprised if this becomes anything other than a replacement for the $649 M1 Air currently being sold at Wal-Mart, so that they don't have to continue producing the M1 chip. Maybe having it sold in Apple stores as well going forward.
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8GB is more than enough for those things, provided you aren’t using electron, chromium, or google apps.
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I did a double take on that too. It seems that while the latest iPad mini does support an external display, it doesn’t support extended displays.
In other words, it lacks multiple display controllers but it still has the simpler silicon needed to adapt a single display controller’s output to various resolutions and displays.
From Apple's 2024 "iPad mini (A17 Pro) - Tech Specs" webpage
"Display Support
Supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors
Supports one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz"
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A bit O/T but I wonder how would you even get Firewire into a modern Mac? Thinking back it'll be 18 years this coming Christmas since I last used my miniDV camera. I should get it out and see if that tape is still readable (unlikely) because it was from the last Christmas before my grandma died. A couple of us knew her cancer was back and it'd likely be her last which is why I could never bring myself to watch it. I don't think I dumped the video or if I did where it is.
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I'd go so far as to say that the M1 MBA is the best "Macintosh" ever made. Astonishingly, Apple managed to build the Goldilocks machine on their very first try with Apple Silicon! Between cost/performance, ease of use and battery life, I can't think of another Mac that is a better embodiment of the 1984 slogan "the computer for the rest of us." Subsequent Apple Silicon MBAs are of course faster and more loaded, but it's debatable whether any of that is worth the extra cost for the "rest of us."
(And I don't even own the M1 MBA, although my wife has the 8GB base model that she is very happy with.)
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Apple used to sell a Firewire to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. Find one of those, plus a TB2 to TB3 adapter?
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I forgot about those and if I had a lot to convert that could be a viable option but if the tape is still readable I have an easy solution. I do have several old Macs, including one that's about 5 feet from me have FW800 on them. The only thing is I don't know what OS, if any is currently on them. I just need to dig out a FW400->800 adapter.
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Many Plustek scanners do. For the few remaining film scanners, Silverfast added ARM64 support in v9 for Macs.
Legacy firewire scanners usually had USB 2 interface as well, for Windows use. My very old large format film scanner does. Yes, it's a bit slower over USB, but scanning an A4 sheet at high res was really slow anyway, so not that much of an issue.
Vuescan, an almost universal scanner driver app, has ARM64 support too. It supports over seven thousand scanner models on all three major OSes, so not really an issue.
About the only thing that will be missed with FW drivers gone is FW audio. With built‑in Mac OS support, FW soundcards and audio accessories like mixing boards had zero latency and were totally plug & play on Macs. Although all of those are legacy products as well, but some still used them through daisy chaining Apple's FW>TB2>TB3 adapters.
All in all, I don't really see an issue, as any legacy products that used FW would have either been long out of support on modern Mac OS anyway (likely since 64‑bit‑only OS), still usable through 3rd party apps like Vuescan, or simply too dated and used for niche cases on an old dedicated Mac with Mojave.
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