Apple Just Gutted Its Laptop Lineup
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
In reality, Apple just price cut all its most popular laptops in a pretty major way.
Want a quad core laptop? It's $1300 instead of $1800 now, and adds the Touch Bar.*
Want a basic MacBook for school or light browsing? The MacBook Air is $100 cheaper now and has a better screen.
These are big, big price cuts, and I think Apple's going to sell more laptops in Q4 than they ever have before.
The 12" MacBook was discontinued, but we can only assume it was never really selling all that well. I think the Air's extra 3/4 pound of weight is somewhat unfortunate but I'd imagine that the extra horsepower is probably needed for most people over the anemic performance of the 12" MacBook.
* Love it or hate it, you still get more tech for the money with the addition of the Touch Bar to the lowest MacBook Pro model. Why exactly do we assume that most people dislike the Touch Bar again? Just because some people are vocal about it online? Apple does collect plenty of telemetry and I assume they wouldn't add it to more models if they figured out that nobody used it.
I just want to point out that telemetry can be misleading; for example, they could also notice lots of people using the Touch Bar if it's very easy to accidentally trigger it.
This doesn't mean that's actually the case here of course; I have no data on that.
Not having paid attention to Mac laptops in a while, that just seems ridiculous. Maybe they're doing great things now, but they must have really been out to lunch if they ended up with a product line where the "Air" model was the heavy and high powered choice.
The 12" MacBook was launched after the Air but did not replace it. I'm not sure why the MacBook was just named "MacBook" but it is what it is, people just didn't really make the extra dollar tradeoff and the Air was a best seller. Especially at launch, the MacBook was quite a bit more expensive than the Air.
I suspect the Air's slightly larger size and cost-optimized design won out over the more expensive, slower MacBook.
Perhaps Apple intended to eventually replace the Air with the MacBook but for whatever reason it just didn't happen.
Reducing the line up indicates to me that Apple recognizes they are not competitive in this market and they are pulling out. Apple's business focus has been and continues to go in other directions.
The Macbook Air was their smallest laptop, this became the opposite when they brought those smaller Macbook Laptops since otherwise they would of just had a rename. I dunno why they didnt just rename the line up. Then they coulda called those smaller Macbooks the new Macbook Airs.
And all their Macs work for development. I wrote about 100K lines of C++ on one of those tiny MacBooks, both at my office desk and all around the world. MacBook Air is OK, but that tiny MacBook was so light I couldn't even tell if it was in my bag without checking.
And all their Macs work for development.
Yes they work, of course, but at this point Apple is powerful and dominant. Apple doesn't need to court developers like us anymore. At this point, many of us are stuck with them.