This bodes well for the rumored entry level MacBook with an A-series chip inside. If they can get the price on those down to $500-$600 it’ll run circles around everything else at the price point.
I would expect to see them use the same sort of game plan for an A series MacBook that they used with the iPhone SE.
Use previous gen parts for items like the screen and body (for cost savings) along with current gen SOCs.
With all of Apple's service offerings these days, they could also potentially justify slim margins by positioning the A-series MacBook as both a loss leader and gateway drug.
Apple TV 4K at 200, MacBook at 600
Back of the napkin math but it checks out.
My m1max is getting along quite nicely, I love this thing.
But the average user will never encounter this. Typical web browsing and office tasks are bursty and mostly single threaded.
Gaming is the only area where it may be more of a problem. But it’s fine for this to simply not be a great gaming laptop. Most laptops aren’t.
The A series has been passively cooled for 15 years inside of systems with much less thermal mass.
Ah but a Chromebook or low end budget PC laptop will? From experience these things fire up like jet engines just to open a text editor.
Claude Code, some light video and photo editing, YouTube, and Netflix.
Not sure what others using an entry level laptop would expect it to do.
It helps that for heavier work I tend to use my desktop I guess.