Apple to Launch 'Low-Cost' MacBook Series Next Year to Rival Chromebooks | Hacker News Reader

Apple to Launch 'Low-Cost' MacBook Series Next Year to Rival Chromebooks

macrumors.com

62 pointstosh100 comments

As stated since 2017, as soon as Apple move to their own Silicon now known as Apple Silicon, there is no reason why they cant have a MacBook SE for $699 all while keeping the same margin. ( Edit: Although in typical Apple fashion, low cost probably mean $799, which still would allow them to claim this is a historical new low cost MacBook, as the previous was $899 MacBook Air 11". Probably worth pointing out in case anyone dont know, Apple already sell an M1 MacBook Air with 128GB storage at $799, but it is only to education only. )

I am just surprised it took them this long. Although the sales of Mac were so good I guess they had zero reason to play this card until now.

Why sell MacBooks for $699 when you can sell them for $1200?

Now they have probably hit the limit for the number of $1200 laptops they can sell, so probably want to broaden their market position (being careful not to cannibalise the number of $1200 laptops they are selling).

They have to be REALLY careful. I have a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and an M1 for personal use, work insisted on getting a 16" MacBook Pro M2 with 32GB of RAM and it's completely wasted.

There is zero reason for me to have anything but the cheapest MacBook Pro/Air, in fact the smaller screen size mean I'm more likely to use it outside the office, meaning I get more use from it. I'm not allow to use it without a monitor an keyboard most of the time anyway, so for most hours of the day the screen size isn't important.

For Go, Python, shell scripting and admin tasks the M1 Air is perfectly fine and if they made a cheaper version that would probably cover most/all of my home usage.

Air only supports 1 monitor (without using a DisplayLink software and dock), but other than that, I can't see any tangible difference for most power users.

I forgot about the one monitor, really should be a minimum of two for professional use.

I'm using 2 via a DisplayLink dock, but it's less than ideal, and comes with some compromises.

I own one, and I found 8GB to be a bit limiting. If you work with something like emacs or vim probably you're fine, but if you try to run Xcode or you program in Java, good luck.

I went for 16GB of RAM because it cannot be upgraded and have already found one situation where it was a life saver (some Docker x86 image that ran poorly on Aarch64 and required 9GB of RAM to finish). Also I cannot see how 8GB of RAM can be sufficient. What is your RAM usage when having just a browser open with a few tabs?

What Apple loses from existing customers downgrading could be made up for by new customers who appreciate the lower price (students, early career professionals, countries with weak currencies). Many of these new customers may stick with the Apple ecosystem. The low cost MacBook could be a 'gateway' product.

Because of price discrimination. By offering a cheaper product, a producer can capture more producer surplus by capturing users who would never have bought at the previous price point. This also allows the company to sell their higher end product at a greater price because the efficient price moves upwards when the lower demand folks get factored out.

True, but suspect that they might have been worried about cannibalisation previously.

You can get MacBook Air for $700 at Costco.

Is this in store?

Cheapest in stock I see on their site is M2 Air for 899

You have to wait for the deals that occur regularly. At least here in Costco Mexico so I assume these also happen in the US.

My wife got an M1 Air for less than $700 some months ago.

Ah nice! Yeah I do see them in the monthly ads from time to time. I'll keep an eye out, thanks!

I thought I heard sales of Macs were way below expected over the last year?

Almost everything is way below expectation over the last year due to 2022 with whiplash effect and abnormal growth + this year recession.

Maybe they pulled an instapot and made a great product that lasts (with only incremental improvements in the next gen).

I got an M1 Air when it came out and an M2 Pro for work, and other than the 16 vs 32 GB, it’s very similar in terms of performance.

I assume it’d be more apparent if i did 3d modeling or video production, but it works very well as a dev machine.

> Maybe they pulled an instapot and made a great product that lasts

This is a longstanding position by apple since ~ the iMac.* The long lifetime (hw quality + software support) means higher resale value and pays off for companies like Apple and Toyota. Why didn’t it help instapot?

Resale value means the investment for a buyer of a new device is (conceptually) lower and signals quality, so you can charge more. And the resold devices serve a customer who can’t pay full retail, keeping the, from giving their money to a competitor.

Now this works bc the new buyer values the new features (else they’d just hang on to the equipment for longer, as I do). Instapot’s problem was they lacked a “killer feature upgrade”: the 2023 model is basically the 2017 model.

* dunno before but I somehow can’t believe a company that shipped the Performa line had the same attitude.

Edit: I had a brain fart and said BMW had a high resale value, while actually they are notorious the other way (since I’ve owned one myself, I shouldn’t have made this mistake). Thanks to Our_Benefactors for pointing this out.

> Why didn’t it help instapot?

it's not expensive enough to warrant buying second hand. Also i don't want to use someone else's cooking utensils for my own food. Never know what they've done with it!

A mac book, on the other hand, is fine, since the most i would touch it is with my hands. The 2nd hand condition doesn't bother me, as long as i just clean it up with nice wipes.

BMW have some of the worst retained value in the car industry.

What a stupid brainfart — thanks for pointing it out. I’ve even owned a BMW so what a thinko! I edited my comment.

One thing that BMW does do well is supporting their vehicles on the road. IIRC they keep the parts production active for a minimum of 10 years past the final model year. Compared to finding parts for domestic American vehicles less than 10 years old (looking at you, Ford), BMW support is leaps and bounds ahead of many alternatives.

I think this is a big part of the problem: the M1 air is basically the perfect laptop for casual use. Powerful enough, very light weight, great screen, and killer battery life.

Luckily for Apple and sadly for everyone else, the SSD is soldiered onto the motherboard, which means that when it gets enough writes, the machine will be toast (short of component level repair, which is possible but difficult and rare).

How often do SSDs wear out? I've never heard of an example in real life even for the heaviest users. Every time I've looked at SSD lifespan metadata out of idle curiosity it has never been particularly close to end-of-life even after years of use.

I've worn out multiple SSDs.

But wearing them out isnt the only issue with soldered on planned obsolescence BS. The real issue is parts like SSDs can just up and fail. And now you have a ticking time bomb in a machine that could otherwise last damn near indefinitely just so Apple can shave a few cents off production and enforce upgrading.

M2 Air here that I use as my dev machine. All I do is backend dev running on Docker, and it's works as well as the M1 Pro 32gb and M2 Max 64gb I've used before. (the challenge in running multiple monitors is the main issue, not performance)

> M2 Air here that I use as my dev machine. All I do is backend dev running on Docker, and it's works as well as the M1 Pro 32gb and M2 Max 64gb I've used before. (the challenge in running multiple monitors is the main issue, not performance)

I'm doing similar stuff, and I think the big thing I'm worried about is SSD write exhaustion. The 8 GB of ram is just not enough to prevent the system using a lot of swap. Especially if I ever need to use Rosetta.

And the way Apple's pricing around ram works, if you're going to upgrade to 16 GB, you might as well just get a pro, which comes base with 16 GB. At least with the Mac Mini/Studio. I'll admit that I'm less familiar with the laptop pricing.

I'm using an Air with 16gb of RAM.

Having had both a 14" M1 Pro and a 16" M2 Max, I feel like the 14" Pro are probably the best value.

It was down YoY, but I am not sure it was below "expectation".

I've actually come to love Chromebooks. We keep one in the kitchen as a general recipe machine/need to pay a bill or whatever. It's cheap, it upgrades itself, the battery is really good, and there's no need for my wife or I to run anything on it outside of a browser.

I don't know why I'd pay a premium for a Mac with that use case. Garageband? I'm certainly not going to be playing games on it.

I've never understood why "I can't see a use for this in my own life" is relevant to whether there is a market for something.

If they release it, I guarantee someone will have thought long and hard over the profitability, there will have been exhaustive market projections, they may even have a long-term strategy with products no-one even knows about yet that dovetails in.

Apple play the long game, they don't release things on a whim.

Ahem the emoji bar? The removal of USB and HDMI ports? It’s just 2 mistakes, but they still came back on both of them.

Macbooks sell quite well despite the implementation details you mention.

And don't confuse "grumblings on tech forums" with a "strategy failure". People on forums can bemoan the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack all they want; the success of a business strategy is measured in dollars:

https://d1-invdn-com.investing.com/content/127a7c89dbe82ad5c...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263402/apples-iphone-rev...

> Ahem the emoji bar?

I like Touch Bar.

Would these even be targeted at your use case? Aren't the majority of Chromebook sales institutional in nature?

My brother is a public high school teacher, so I'm somewhat familiar. They're to schools, where the objective is to have something that's cheap, easy to administer, and locked down. They also tie into Google Classroom/GSuite and have limited local storage. Many Chromebooks aren't given to a specific student, but rolled out in carts and handed out during a "computer lab" time.

While a Mac would work, a cart full of Macs is radically more expensive than a cart full of Chromebooks. A family friend is a music teacher that uses Logic, so maybe that's a use case, or iOS development.

Well, I think it all depends on why someone is buying a Chromebook.

Is it because they want a cheap clamshell with a keyboard? (Tablets adjust poorly to this use case.)

Is it because they want a cheap general-purpose computer?

I've seen enough non-institutional users of Chromebooks to see that there is a market for them. (I had one of the original demo units and really liked it.) I can see why Apple would want to get a piece of that market.

Did you know that it has a three-year lifespan mandated by Google, and after that it will not receive upgrades?

That's incorrect. All current and recent-ish Chromebooks get at least eight years from date of release. And with the move to separate Chrome (the browser) from the OS, it will be possible to update the browser even after system upgrades are finished.

Google uses the term AUE (automatic update expiration) for the end of service. They provide a list of AUE dates here:

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en#zip...

The model I have has an auto-update expiration in 2030, but that is a common criticism that they don't surface the AUE date when you're buying one. I checked here before purchasing: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

As part of the Lacros update Google is making, the OS can be updated separately from the browser so they'll continue to receive browser updates even after AUE.

Hopefully not, because that's incorrect. AUE dates for AFAIK all currently sold Chromebooks are 8 years from release.

It's 8 years and even then you'll still be be able to enable updates for Google chrome

>Garageband?

Yes, that is exactly why I need one. I'm not joking when I say that is the only reason.

Other applications that run on Windows or Linux have been very confusing to me in comparison. Garageband always felt intuitive.

1. Keep in mind this rumor is weak. It's from someone without a track record.

2. I don't believe this a market for Apple. To compete in the Chromebook market, largely education, it's about all about volume and cost (How many Chromebooks can I get per $1,000 I spend?). And the current per-unit cost is about $250.

3. Education institutions could get M1 MacBook Airs for $699, but they don't for two main reasons: 1. they're over twice as much as a $250 Chromebook, and 2. they're far less durable than a $250 Chromebook. And replacement rates are very high in the education markets.

4. One possible way Apple might be able to compete is to make durable, cheap ($499 or less) MacBooks and then commit to ~7 year OS updates. A little more upfront cost, but customers would probably save on long-term hardware and staffing costs.

Right now, we're throwing away perfectly usable Chromebooks because they are on something like a 4 year OS lifecycle.

An international perspective, related to cited educational use -

iPads are huge in Asia for private schools. Chromebooks barely register. An additional $500 over 3 years won't register much in terms of total private education costs; I can see a role where the demand for total Apple products (applebook+iPhone+iPad+iStuff) is complimented, not substituted.

The only thing people are missing here is that it's not just about the hardware, it's about Chrome in particular.

Our school system "requires" the use of the Chrome browser because of the third-party plugins that only support Chrome. The school board thinks the best way to do that is... of course... to buy Chromebooks.

They're awful. Terribly slow, constantly breaking, and a total disaster. I'd love to see MacBooks come into use here, but sadly it's not just about the hardware. The school board has to stop being lured by shitty software vendors.

Yes, I'd love to vote them out.

> The school board thinks the best way to do that is... of course... to buy Chromebooks.

I wouldn't be surprised if the school were sold on these plugins on the basis that you can use them using only a Chromebook.

Jobs scorned the “Chromebook” segment (I can’t even recall what the jargon was... “netbook”?) when the analysts were crying that apple would die without it. There’s a different team on board now but I’d bet the logic is unchanged.

But they aren’t ignoring this segment, rather they’ve differentiated the iPad instead. For you (I assume) and me this is absurd, but then again the Chromebook is pretty useless for most HN readers too.

I'm curious if this will run on a full-fledged version of MacOS or if we'll finally start to see the ipad-ification of a laptop from apple

They really should just enable mac apps on the iPad, and let that be the low-cost MacBook.

Different input devices really do need different UI controls, if you want a comfortable and polished experience. You can just do it anyway and expect the user to 'deal with it', but you end up with experiences that people just don't really like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC

an iPad with the Apple keyboard brings input parity, so really nothing holding back running Mac apps.

An ipad with a keyboard would still have an issue with the control design disparity between touch input vs pointer input.

There is something to be said about the laptop form factor and macOS enabling productivity. That said, I would definitely see the guts of an iPad being put in the frame of a laptop with macOS.

MacOS generally needs more ram than iPadOS because iPadOS can be more aggressive about pausing and closing applications to free up more ram than MacOS can be. I think some modern iPads are still at 4GB when that's too low for modern MacOS.

The Air and 2 port Pro are very close to being the guts of an iPad Pro in a laptop chassis with macOS anyway.

Obvious strategy for price segmentation: it runs full macOS but can only install/run apps from the app store, and has no Terminal.app. At a stroke that partitions the market so developers and admin UNIX lover types can't buy them. Pro media users can't either because not enough RAM. But it runs Safari and iLife.

I assume this will be lower cost through plastic casing, M1, and low RAM/storage.

Currently the M1 is sufficient for 90%+ of the population (IMO), it is the RAM/storage that will outdate most Apple computers. If Apple sells this in the $599-799 range with 8GBs of RAM that would be a solid offering for most K-12 schools.

We already have... they've destroyed reparability by soldering in the SSD and the RAM, and they turn into soft-bricked e-waste every time someone donates one and doesn't remove their Apple cloud account first.

They reduced the need to repair due to disk or RAM failure by getting rid of the connectors.

I am not claiming they did this out of the sweetness of their hearts, but I do challenge your first point.

I believe apple could fix the “didn’t log out of iCloud” problem if they want, even if only through through some special apple-only refurb process. They would have to have some way to figure out n if it were stolen or legitimately discarded. But they have no incentive to do this.

I've never seen a disk connector failure, but I've constantly seen disk failures. Soldering your disk to your mainboard also makes the cost (and odds of failure) of data recovery much higher.

When I covered IT hardware companies on Wall Street, I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".

Around the same time, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".

A lot of Apple-related rumors turn out to just be wishful thinking or internal prototypes that never got released.

I have no doubt Apple has or is working on something like this but it would really surprise me if they target the low end for their devices.

I recently purchased a new M1 Macbook Air 2020 model) on Amazon for $750 and it is great. I had previously owned this same model but with 16GB of ram instead of 8GB so I was a bit nervous, but it has been a non-issue.

I suspect Apple is using Amazon to test selling the Macbook Air at a significantly lower price than you can get on their website. The only thing I think they could do to make it cheaper would be to make it out of plastic instead of aluminum.

Borderline clickbait, as the title is written to be more definitive than the actual article, especially from a site called MacRUMORS.

"... claims a new report out of Taiwan."

"This is the first rumor we have heard that Apple is actively developing a new MacBook series that the company will price below its more premium MacBook offerings, so expectations should remain guarded until we receive corroboration from other sources."

Making the laptop cheaper will not solve any of the usability and manageability issues with macOS. If I was going to rank my wishlist, at the top would be the protracted outage that accompanies every OS update. ChromeOS updates itself in seconds and you barely notice. macOS grinds for several minutes before the reboot and 10-20 minutes during the reboot. It sucks!

ChromeOS uses A/B partition scheme, so it essentially downloads the updates in background and apply them to the non-active partition and then notifies the user to restart which is essentially just switching to the other partition.

I really hope they bring back the fun styles, more like the old G3’s! I know my kids would love that.

will they have 2gb of ram and cost $200 to upgrade the memory to 8gb?

No, but if they did people would still buy them because the 2GB version would outperform an 8GB Chromebook in daily tasks.

Apple isn’t going to ship something that doesn’t beat the pants off a Chromebook.

Sure, but it's going to start out at double the price. Then the upgrades that most users need will raise the price to the point where you might as well buy that Macbook Air anyways similar to the base iPad lineup and the iPad Pro.

It's not so much the chromebooks that won over education. It's the Google Docs workspace which is relatively simple for schools to use.

LowCost MacBook + Office 365 for Education...

Maybe a way to bring the beloved 12" Macbook back, but this time with an M3 instead of underpowered intel M series chip

I wonder if Apple is going to make an iPad with a clamshell keyboard? I see so many people use them like laptops now.

I'm not sure I believe this rumor.

I've never been a fan of Apple, but the Macbook trackpad keeps me from switching.

Whose is second best?

Microsoft, PC trackpad has gotten better in recent years because Microsoft invested in it for their Surface lineup while opening up opportunity for other PC marker to ride on ( or buy ) those improvement.

Dell XPS or Surface

I’ll never buy a Dell XPS again. The fan is awful. I’ll stick to Macbooks.

Yeah, I was just commenting on the trackpad.

I've been Apple-only for many years, but if I wanted a dedicated Windows machine, the Surface Pro appears very compelling.

Great.... more e-waste

Buying a low end Apple product is a terrible idea. They cannot be upgraded. So you'll just be stuck with 8GB of RAM and 256GB internal storage... meaning lots of problems with getting all the dozen dongles and external devices you have to attach to it staying working. And don't even think about trying to open Photoshop and a browser.

The only decent apple computers start at about $2k and up.

Back when the M1's debuted, my 2016 Pro was sort of disintegrating, so I sprung for a lowest-tier Air (8gb RAM 256 SSD) as a stopgap until the M1 Pro I really wanted came along.

use: full-stack web, some dallying in XCode. That computer freaking soared, more performant than my older computer with 4x RAM. And software has not gotten more demanding in the past year… or the past ten years, really.

These computers do more with less. The game has changed, this isn't the nineties where an eighteen-month-old computer can't run new games or whatever.

> The only decent apple computers start at about $2k and up.

Sorry, but this is either plain wrong, or you have a more demanding workload than the vast majority of users. The Macbook Air is a fantastic machine available for far less than $2k.

It's true that the Macbook Air satisfies a number of use cases, but I would argue that a stripped down Chromebook type laptop would satisfy a lot of those use cases as well.

The problem is that to get multiple displays, virtualize Windows, do video editing, etc. You need to upgrade to 16gb of ram and 1tb of storage if not more, which quickly puts you around $2k.

Higher end use cases (which virtualizing windows is) requires higher end hardware. I'm not surprised the base machines don't work for that case. Of course, chromebooks don't really either.

It's a bit like saying the Ford F150 pickup can't tow 20,000 pounds. It's true, and if you need to tow that much you need the more expensive pickup. But the F150 does just fine with lighter loads, and people love it.

They should work, the problem is that to actually virtualize, you need more ram and adequate hard drive space for the vm's, it's not upgradable and the upgrades cost a fortune. A 16gb 1tb Macbook Air 13" is 1,799 so not quite 2,000 but close enough. Anyways, the comment we are replying to wasn't comparing the chromebook to a macbook, it's just saying that you have to pay $2k for a decent mac, which is true, because a 16gb, 1 tb macbook air 13" with applecare is $2k. Otherwise you're just writing word documents and surfing the web, which any machine can do.

As opposed to the 4 gig of ram and 128g of storage on the Chromebooks which cannot be upgraded that this is meant to compete with?

Yes. Those are terrible computers too but at least they advertise they aren't full computers.

All you know at this point is that these are low cost computers, and there appears to be a target of grade school use.

Chromebooks are not meant for photoshop.

I don’t know what you mean by “not full computers”.

> I don’t know what you mean by “not full computers”

Chromebooks are sold as laptops that run (only) Chrome. It's in the name. Most people don't expect to able to run full-blown desktop applications on them.

Have you used a recent M1/M2 Macbook yet? Even on the low end, their ability to deliver grunt over what the specs might imply is very impressive compared to a similarly specced PC. I had the same skepticism as you until I got my first M1 Macbook and saw it move very slickly with anything I threw at it despite the modest specs.

I do tech support for a couple extended family members that have M1 macbooks and they're quite terrible computers. I couldn't believe Apple sold a computer for $1600 with only 8GB of ram and 256GB storage and a 13" screen. I spend most of my time re: M1 Apple computers fixing the people's problems with their computer not being able to back up to their external drives because the internal tiny drives are full and time machine can't run.

Why do apple charge a premium but give the lowest storage and ram they can get away with (at least for the base models)... I would genuinely like to know. Especially now that it's all onboard.

If I was charging through the nose I'd at least solder a few extra nand chips out of an ethical desire to give a full-fat product for the premium price.

I know Dell do the same thing though. If you want extra ram... it'll be 3x what Amazon will sell at. But apple charge a bigger premium for the base product I feel.

Apple devices seem to handle resources much more efficiently. Especially the m1/m2 units. Got my mom an entry level air 7 years ago. It's still super fast, even on the latest supported MacOS. If you need large amounts of memory, purchasing something without that is a bad idea, yes.

>>And don't even think about trying to open Photoshop

You believe everyone uses Photoshop? or even uses a Graphics editor at all.

>> They cannot be upgraded.

I would say over 60% of all laptops sold today can not be upgraded.. even more if you only look at RAM, a majority of laptops from Dell, Lenovo, etc have non-upgradable memory. and very limited upgrade options for storage.

I agree, those laptops are terrible too. But whataboutism doesn't change that they're both terrible. Nor that decent laptops exist, nor that good desktops exist.

Most apps are web apps these days. No need for good hardware. Just dedicated js and video player functionality is good enough

Reply on news.ycombinator.com