Apple’s laptop lineup is confusing… again.
You’ve heard the news, you’ve seen the ads, and you’ve read the headlines — Apple announced not one, but 2 new Mac laptops at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference — both with a shiny new Apple Silicon M series chip, the M2. I don’t want to just recap the laptop section of the event with numbers and those vague, nonsense charts — I want to dive deep into the new chips below the numbers, what they mean, the computers they’re in, and why Apple has made a significant step back in the simplicity of their lineup.
First, let’s talk about the M2 — the shiny new thing that everyone can’t stop yapping about. Look, I don’t think the M2 is worth much of our attention. For the past 2 years (literally), Apple has been amidst a widely publicized transition away from using Intel-made chips to their own in-house silicon. This transition has gotten us Mac users used to halting our judgment and blindly watching what Apple has to say, and it’s worked! Every single Mac event, Apple has continuously surprised us with how good their chips were. But now that the transition is coming to a close (except for the wildly anticipated Mac Pro, which we’re still waiting on), we need to tone our expectations down a bit. Chip design is never exciting year-over-year, usually yielding a 10–20% improvement per generation. No matter how advanced chip fabrication gets, any sensible microprocessor manufacturer won’t and can’t change the fabrication so much that users see a 50% improvement. It isn’t possible. With all that being said, the M2 can’t and isn’t a huge improvement over the M1. Most of the differences come in the single-core CPU scores — preliminary benchmarks show about a 200-point difference in single-core benchmarks from M1, which is not a lot. Yes, it will make everything just a small bit snappier, like opening Safari or responding to emails. But for most people, it’ll be hard to tell the difference. Because of the single-core jump, multi-core scores get an improvement as well. Nearly 18%, according to the same benchmark. This puts the M2 well ahead of the M1 chip, and right behind the binned M1 Pro (the 8-core version) chip. Sounds great, right? There’s more to the story — the M2 gets 2 more GPU cores than the M1, putting it at 10 cores total. From what we can see, these cores aren’t different at all. There’s just more of them, which I guess is fine. We don’t have benchmarks of these yet, but I’m sure the M2 will be around 15–25% faster. Are you seeing a theme here? On paper, the M2 seems like a sizable improvement. But the more you think about it, these small increments aren’t going to completely change the user experience. Yes, things will load faster. Notifications will be snappy. Browsing will be speedy. But didn’t we already get that with the M1? If we take a step back, the M2 is a way for Apple to play catch up with the rest of the market (or, at this point, what the marketing is coming up with) — if you have an M1 machine, the M2 isn’t going to be a massive must have like the M1 was back 18 months ago, just like the A14 wasn’t from the A13. All of the hype over this chip is mostly unwarranted, in my opinion — is this a cool upgrade? Of course, But is it a must-have, gotta have it, going-to-change-your-life upgrade? Absolutely not, and thinking of it that way is short-sighted. 2 more things: Apple now offers the M2 with more memory, now 24 gigs. This confused a lot more people than it should have because it’s not a usual number that you’d see RAM in. But that’s because most of us are used to buying rams in DIMMS, and those usually start at 8 and go to 16 all the way to 32. But since this is Unified RAM, Apple can do whatever they want with it as long as it’s a multiple of the base amount. So, 24 is an option. Sure, I guess. More small improvements. One last thing — the M2 chip has a media engine, similar to the M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips. I was extremely surprised by this addition — Apple usually prioritizes cost and design over performance in their recent consumer computers. This is far from that stance — to add dedicated silicon for a task that very few people who are in the market for this computer will be able to take advantage of is… surprising. Some would even say shocking. I’m not against the addition per se, more than I’m confused. But hey, Apple decided to do it, and I guess it will provide real-world benefits for people who can take advantage of the stuff, say, for example, someone who’s just getting started with video production and doesn’t have the budget for a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio. This chip is going to be much better for this person than the M1 ever could be. Dedicated silicon for dedicated tasks provides benefits beyond belief. If you’re interested in seeing what dedicated silicon can really do, I suggest reading my MacBook Pro review. Other than the obvious year-to-year improvements that we see with basically every microprocessor, there’s not really much else to see here. It’s a fairly basic chip. A good chip, don’t get me wrong, this is the best consumer processor Apple has ever made, regardless of its price-to-performance, but fairly basic. Let’s talk about what this chip goes into, because that’s a lot more controversial and exciting, and sets the stage for why I’m a bit iffy on this upgrade.
Enough beating around the bush — Apple announced a new MacBook Air, and as you might guess, it has the M2 chip. I am a huge fan of this computer. A lot of people have said that they hated it because it ditched the wedge shape in return for this more boxy style that Apple has been going for as of late. But honestly, I disagree with the haters — The boxy style provides an elegant, yet sort of industrial design to the computer that Apple machines have always had. Well, at least before Jony Ive. This computer feels perfect — It’s lightweight, it’s compact, yet it provides all of the power of the M2. I like it. The new MacBook Air also gets MagSafe, which is amazing. What’s not amazing is that Apple decided to omit the HDMI port and SD card slot on this machine unlike the MacBook Pro, which is honestly pretty disappointing. If they’re going to throw a media encode/decode engine into this machine, I bet that they could have put more pro features into it to get more users into Macs. Back to the good stuff — the machine also has a high-impedance headphone jack. Apple took the same headphone jack from the MacBook Pro and jammed it into the MacBook Air. Those who don’t understand this feature, or think it’s a waste of money probably don’t need it. But alas, Apple has decided to put more of its pro-focused features into a cheaper computer. This aligns with my theory that Apple takes all of the good features and put them in the pro machines first to beta test them, and then slowly hands them down to the consumer machines. This is a pretty good strategy to maximize cost savings since parts become cheaper down the line and to provide pro users with an incentive to upgrade. But wait, there’s more! In October 2020, the Apple world was shooketh when some dumb leaker on some Chinese site said that the MacBook Pro, the new shiny one, would have a notch. Nobody believed them, including me, but guess what, it happened. Now, a couple of months later, Apple has brought this same notch to the MacBook Air. EWWW. BOO. Say it with me. BOOOO. Say it like you mean it. BOOOOOOO! Suck it, notch! Apple says the screen size has increased to 13.6 inches, which honestly, is pretty good. I’m still not looking forward to the millions of people who are about to erupt by looking at how macOS still hasn’t fixed the horrible wrapping of the menu bar items when the notch exists. But look, I guess I digress. Apple doesn’t market the screen as being 14” big though, unlike the MacBook Pro with 2 sizes — in fact, they really don’t publicize the specs of the screen at all, probably because the screen is the same except for the reduction in border size. Pretty disappointing. A lot of nerds were mad about the fact that it didn’t seem like the MacBook Air supported the P3 color gamut because, in the keynote, Apple only said the screen supported millions of colors, a term used to indicate that the display isn’t super awesome. But don’t worry weirdos, Apple’s documentation confirms that it is indeed P3. On to the speakers — Apple, unfortunately, takes pride in their laptop speakers, making bold claims like “high fidelity” or using buzzwords like “Spatial Audio” when they’re usually just well-tuned laptop speakers. Apple laptops to this day have always had speakers visible at the sides of the keyboard, but that isn’t the case with the new MacBook Air. Apple hid the speakers behind the keyboard and in front of the hinge. If you own a 2021 MacBook Pro and look behind the keyboard area where the display meets with the top case, you’ll see that there are some air vents back there for better cooling. Since the MacBook Air has no fans, this space is instead occupied by speakers. Apple says this will provide better base and instrument separation, but I guess we’ll have to see when this machine goes on sale. Apple also harps about their webcams in their machines, trying to make them sound revolutionary when they’re about the crappiest in the market. Apple finally “upgraded” the webcam to 1080p, finally, FINALLY killing the god-awful 720P camera from the Intel days. Finally, something good came out of COVID-19! The computer also packs the usual assortment of studio-quality mics which are only good in the most perfect environments. Seriously. But the Apple people will tell you otherwise, recording full-on songs with displays. JK, I love ya Jo Mo. Other than all that, nothing else has changed. The battery seems to be the same size and should last you about the same (save for efficiency improvements that may come with M2), the cooling system remains the same, so no active cooling at all, and no other massive improvements. It seems like a really solid machine. So with all this, it looks like an obvious successor to the old MacBook Air, right? Good improvements, but nothing super fancy… but there’s a catch. And that’s where we get to the controversy. But first, let’s talk about a machine that’s neither fancy nor good.
Of course, I’m talking about the “new” MacBook Pro. Last year, we were blessed with a couple of interesting rumors regarding the future of this weird machine. Some leakers said that it would get major design enhancements, including a similar build to the 14” MacBook Pro, more ports, a better screen, and of course the M2 chip itself. If this happened and it retained its $1299 price tag, it would have a place in the market. But, in a weird corner of the internet, another rumor emerged that predicted that the computer would remain the same — same Touch Bar, same battery, same build, screen, and ports, except for the M2 chip. Unfortunately, the latter came true. Apple took the same 6-year-old aging design of the M1 MacBook Air (already a horrible value when announced alongside the M1 MacBook Air) and simply put an M2 in it. That’s right. They haven’t even touched ANYTHING else. It’s the same lackluster, boring, and downright embarrassing design. This computer is $100 more expensive than the MacBook Air (we’ll get into pricing later) but has a (1) worse webcam, (2), worse screen, (3), fewer ports, (4), worse speakers, and (5), weighs more and is thicker. I don’t know about you, but that’s an embarrassment to the Mac lineup. The only way that this machine outperforms the cheaper MacBook Air is in battery life, and that’s minuscule too. Barely 2 hours more. Oh, and of course, it has a fan — which is largely unnecessary with the M2. It reminds me of The Dark Times in 2018 where Apple was selling 3 computers all within $100 of each other: a small, thermally constrained MacBook, an equally thermally constrained MacBook Air that was recently announced, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a bad keyboard, throttled processor, aging specs, and bad value. That was it for Apple’s laptop offerings, and it put new Mac consumers in a weird place. Quinn Nelson, host of Snazzy Labs made an amazing video comparing the 3 back in 2018, but honestly, that video should have never had to have been made in the first place, and it certainly shouldn’t have to be made now. Things are much different now — Apple has a strong, competitive MacBook Air with a blazing-fast chip, great screen, and awesome battery life; they have a MacBook Pro with more ports, a world-class screen, and chips that out-compete every other offering in the market while being cheaper, sipping less juice, and being more powerful — all without thermal constraints. Apple is killing it with their laptop lineup, but now, we have to add an asterisk to that statement that was once true. Let’s talk about this lineup.
Apple currently offers 5 laptops, 3 of which with the same name — The M1 MacBook Air, the M2 MacBook Air, the M2 MacBook Pro 13”, the M1 Pro/M1 Max MacBook Pro 14”, and the M1 Pro/M1 Max MacBook Pro 16”. See how this can get complicated? First, Apple kept the M1 MacBook Air around, but not at a reduced price. It still starts at $999 (which is a great deal). But this means that the new shiny M2 MacBook Air gets a price increase, which I really, really, really hate. It now goes up to $1,199. Remember what I said about the M2 MacBook Air sounding like a direct successor to the M1 MacBook Air? Well, I guess Apple doesn’t view it that way. Apple should have gone one of 3 ways with this: 1, they could have lowered the M1 MacBook Air’s price to $899 and put the MacBook Air M2 at $999 (meh); 2, they could have killed the M1 MacBook Air entirely and put the M2 one at $999 (preferred); or 3, they could have killed the M1 MacBook Air and made the M2 MacBook Air $1,099. Either way, it would have made more sense than this nonsense plan of keeping the M1 MacBook Air as a side-product. I don’t like it. It’s confusing and paints the M2 MacBook Air in a confusing light where it doesn’t seem like a good deal (and it isn’t a good deal, that’s for sure) and paints the M1, a now 18-month-old computer as an overpriced computer. Neither of these statements are true. Still, I don’t know if I would recommend someone spend $200 more on the M2 MacBook Air. That M1 still seems fine. Are you noticing the problem here? These computers aren’t well priced anymore. They’re way too confusing. It’s now a game of going through the spec sheet and the marketing material looking at every single feature and making a decision. At the end of the day, the price increase is bad and the M1 MacBook Air shouldn’t have existed. Before WWDC, if someone said, “what Mac should I buy?” I would easily, no questions asked, recommend the M1 MacBook Air for its incredible value in simplicity. Now, I’m not so sure. Do you video edit? The video encoders would be handy. Or maybe you need a MacBook Pro. Do you do a lot of conference calls (I mean, who doesn’t)? A better webcam may be helpful. What’s your budget? Do you just scroll web pages? What kind of web pages? And don’t even get me started on configuration options. Since the M2 mow comes in 24 gigs while starting at 8 gigs, it makes the RAM options even more confusing to choose from. Before it was just a matter of how many Chrome tabs you used, but now since there are more options, you really have to consider your options. And if you go too far into this rabbit hole, you’ll get to the point where you’ll be asking yourself questions like “does RAM really matter” and “does Unified Memory mean that I need less RAM?” See, it’s so much more complicated — unnecessarily too. If Apple wants to get more people to buy Macs and keep buying them, they need to make the darn purchase decision easier. But that’s just the MacBook Air. All of those options only apply to one line of laptops. There’s also the low-end MacBook Pro, which is horrible and convolutes the lineup even further — it’s just $100 more than the expensive MacBook Air, so does that mean it’s better? I mean, it has the word pro in it! That has to mean it’s better, right? But wait, there are 2 more pros, more pro-y pros that cost $700 more. That’s way too much! I’ll stick with the cheaper pro that’s also pro even though it has fewer features than the Air but it costs more than the Air and Pro technically mean it costs more so I don’t know if it’s Pro so maybe I should just go for the non-Air Air since the non-Air Air is actually heavier than the regular Air so… do you see the problem here, Apple? Is this seriously how you’re going to market your laptops? The price gap between the old Air, the new Air, and the old-new Pro are all different. But what is a consumer to do when they have $1500 to spend? I don’t know! What if they want a larger laptop? SOL. There’s this massive price gap between the bad pro and the good pro, there’s a super tiny price gap between the technically pro and good Air, and there’s a mid-size gap between the good Air and the bad Air. Hot damn, this is more gaps than in an Old Navy bathroom! What’s a consumer to do when buying a laptop is this complicated, this cumbersome, and makes no sense at all? Why doesn’t Apple market all of the configuration options as standard builds? Because they can only make so many SKUs. Understandable. But why does a consumer care? Apple currently sells a great but old computer that’s $200 cheaper than the even better but overpriced computer which is $100 cheaper than the horrible computer which is $700 cheaper than the good computer which is once again $500 cheaper than the good large computer. This is a mess with tons of backstory that no consumer should care about — the reason Apple sells the trash-dump of a computer is because it’s the second-best-selling computer they sell. That’s just the truth. It’s also because it’s incredibly cheap to get parts for it. That’s the same reason they sell the MacBook Air M1 — it’s because it’s cheap to make. But why should an unsuspecting user care about the logistics of business? Apple should just man up, take the L, and do a Steve Jobs-sized killing of their bad products. Because this is the worst Apple’s lineup has looked while being pretty good in… a while.
I’m not going to blindly complain about how Apple should man up and fix their mess. Absolutely not. We’re top-tier journalists that go below the surface and analyze this company over here. JK, it’s just me and I’m an idiot. But I am going to offer some solutions — first, Apple should kill the M1 MacBook Air. It’s a great machine, but it’s too expensive and doesn’t have a place. The M2 MacBook Air has taken its place and is the obvious successor to the M1. It’s a better machine. The M1 should die a happy death — not be placed on this overpriced pedestal that it currently sits on. Next, the M2 MacBook Air should get a price reduction of $100. That thing is way too expensive for what it is. It’s a great machine and somewhat warrants a price increase over its predecessor, but $200 is way too much. $1,099 is perfect. They also need to do a better job of recommending certain specs for certain workflows. Buyers need to understand that there’s more in the middle of this massive gap between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, especially since this computer can be more expensive than the base MacBook Pro. Making more SKUs available will fill up the lineup and give users more choice. They don’t need to stock these SKUs, just make them pre-configured. After that, they should kill the M2 MacBook Pro. I hope I don’t need to explain my reasoning here — that machine is bad, outdated, and overpriced. It’s time for it to die. Heck, give the MacBook Air a Touch-Bar SKU if that’s what it takes. This computer is just bad. Finally, they need to make a new computer — a 15” MacBook Air with the same M2 processor. Same specs, same everything. Just a bigger screen and a bigger battery. Apple is doing this with the iPhone this year — and it makes sense. People want big, cheap things, and Apple needs to understand this. This computer would do 2 things: it would give people more options as to what to buy in the large price gap between the 13” MacBook Air and the 14” MacBook Air, and it would allow people to get what they want, a big cheap thing. I’m so confused why Apple hasn’t made this a reality. It’s shameful.
So that’s it — Apple’s laptop is as confusing as it was in 2018, with an old computer sitting at the same price as it was launched, its successor costing $100 more than it should, a bad computer that bears the Pro badge of honor sitting only $100 higher than the MacBook Air with M2, and a large $700 price gap between the entry-level machines and the Pro ones. I don’t know about you, but this is the worst I’ve seen the Mac so far. I don’t like it at all. Apple should fix this ASAP. As for ordering all of this crap — you can get the M2 chip in hand in the crappy machine today, the day this blog post is being birthed… uh… written. I’m sure every single content creator who crapped over this machine will be buying it to get a head start on benchmarks, so that’s cool, I guess. The MacBook Air is somewhere in the clouds thanks to the beer flu lockdowns, and that’s that. TL;DR? Fine. Apple has a bad laptop lineup with bad pricing, bad computers, and bad marketing. They also made an M2 chip that’s been heavily publicized but is a small year-over-year bump. Look, there are tons of things I haven’t touched, like why someone should buy an M2 over an M1 Pro (they shouldn’t for performance alone), the logistics into Apple’s Pro marketing, the leaked M2 benchmarks, and so much more. This concludes post #2 on WWDC22. Next, I’ll be covering Project Titan and the new CarPlay Interface — so stay tuned. Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.
