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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

What's the point?

This would only cannibalize their higher tier sales with a low margin product. I don't get it.

This company is visionless.

People who buy high-end MacBook Pros are still going to buy MacBook Pros. The idea here is to pick up sales that would otherwise go to cheaper PC laptop brands, by competing at a lower price point than the MacBook Air currently does.

Right now, Apple still (quietly) sells the MacBook Air M1 at $599 to keep a toe in that lower-end market, but I doubt many people who are considering a Pro or an M4 Air are persuaded to choose that instead.

People who bought MacBooks and were forced into MBPs now can go back to MacBooks.

The argument goes both ways.

They're anything but visionless. This is a departure from an upwards sell trajectory but if it sold in volumes, it goes to the classic quote "quantity has a quality all of it's own" -usually taken in context it means giving up the quality drive, but in reality it's neutral to the other product line.

It may cannibalize SOME of the existing market, yes. all of it? I don't think my peers on M4 boxes with 32GB+ are going to go for this any more than they did when the Air came out and they had powerful boxes.

Not disagreeing re: vision for quality software and new products. However this segmentation is pretty good. Most everyone buying a Macbook today wants "M" performance. Most everyone who does not care about "benchmarks" and is price sensitive (likely a surprisingly large number of folks), is put off by MB pricing. So you gimp the processor, lower the price, take a bit of a margin hit on net profit for hware, but capture lots of sales and canabalize virtually no "M" sales. Plus I would guess the Apple has done enough market analysis to understand that the folks buying this new Macbook are likely to want to subscribe to something Apple offers which will offset the lower hware margin.

"Most everyone" is pointless anecdotal talk. Most of the people I know have a mbp cuz their company buys it and they couldn't care less about a powerful computer if it wasn't for working or gaming (but that's not Apple's turf anyway).

It doesn't change anything with their higher tier sales. Those are bought for a reason that a lower tier device cannot satisfy.

My worry (from Apple's POV) is that all the people who buy the cheapest Mac (currently for $1k) will instead go for this new "base model". And I suspect there's a large cohort of people who "just want a Mac".

I'm guessing firstly it won't be a lot cheaper and secondly it may appeal to the very large number of people who buy cheaper windows laptops.

And who cares about such a segment? There's very little money to make there.

It's highly competitive, the audience is budget oriented, in fact not sure if they are why would they consider the cheap but sure pricier MacBook.

There's a lot of them though. Apple's sales are about 22 mil macbooks/yr, total laptop sales are like 260 mil, or about 9%.

In phones Apple have about 27% and a cheaper phone in the $599 16e.

I don't see why they shouldn't go for a similar strategy to the phones.

Maybe they should only offer MacBook Pros, then.

Google is converging ChromeOS and Android in 2026 Qualcomm Arm laptops by HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.

Probably to take back a bunch of the education market, which was lost to Chromebooks.

Yes, Apple is visionless.

creative destruction at work.

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