This device can be great for use in schools and very competitive in the cheaper laptop market, assuming they price it reasonably (499-599 base pricing).
It could be actually pretty decent if you take the processor from the 16e and put it into a laptop. Hell you could basically just put the logic board in there and add more ram to it and leave the modem and it would get decent geekbench numbers and great battery life.
From looking at the geekbench scores, the A18 in the 16e is almost as powerful as the M1 MacBook Air. Just give it more ram.
Where your margin worries apply is that those competitors can pack more computer into those lower prices... because they are not chasing towards 50% margin on each unit sold. On the other hand, Apple seems to be a margin-foremost company, so a hypothetical $600-$800 A-series MB can't have total costs out the door of more than $300-$400 for the actual computer.
Apple targets (and hits) margins in the 36-38 percent range for products. (And 75% for services!).
36-43 percent is the gross margin across the whole product line, including services. I think the average Mac margin is something like 20 to 25 percent.
The cheaper the product, the lower the margin it has. Eg, a Mac mini at $600 has lower margin than a Mac mini with M Pro SoCs at $1300. Or an iPad Air at $600 has lower margin than a $1000 iPad Pro.
If they sell a Mac laptop with A18 Pro and a 13” LCD display, 12 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, they probably can hit $700 and still have 20% margins. It really should be 16 GB and 256 GB. That will make for a long running Mac, usable for 5, 6, 8 years.
$300 laptops are even further defeatured. 4 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC storage, 100 PPI displays. Just crappy machines for our school age kids. Like, their phones are 2x more performant than their school issued laptops. Apple isn’t going to compete in this market, imo.
No profits, no margins on the hardware in this market. All the money made is in the support contract and the device management contract. A $600 to $700 product? Profits can be made on hardware sales, and on subscription services.
It's probable that Apple has been testing Macs (more than one model) using A-series SoCs for 10+ years in their labs, that is, before the M-series silicon became a reality.
For sure Apple is intimately familiar with A-series SoC capabilities and limitations. The benefits of releasing a Mac with an A-series SoC are probably A.) lower cost and B.) lower power consumption.
The A-series SoCs have plenty of performance for the average user: iPhones have been editing 4K video for a decade now and that's probably the heaviest normal workload for Joe Consumer. It's not like office suites, e-mail, content consumption or web browsing require more horsepower.
Presumably a lower price MacBook would open up more opportunities for enterprise/education sales where 3D gaming performance is not performance metric. A lower power SoC would result in better battery performance which might lead to a thinner form factor.
The Airs and the Pros will move to higher end screens. The Air will get Mini LED, the Pros get the Tandem OLED. These low cost laptops will get the LCD. My guess these laptops are for low cost education market (think eMac remember those!) and using the orders they have to make well in advance.
The key to such a device is reducing the cost of the materials. The A18 Pro (according to Wikipedia) offers 8GB RAM and a (one) USB 3.2 controller. The RAM's enough to run Apple Intelligence and we've seen one-port notebooks before: the target audience will likely use it mostly for charging. HDMI comes in dongles, as does SD card and headphones if they're really necessary but the core device can just major on wireless (it's all in the A18 already).
There's money to be saved by using a slower SSD, just 256GB presumably. Ditto on display quality. Smaller trackpad?
Once upon a time, only upmarket Mac notebooks had metal cases, the rest had polycarbonate, so that's a possibility too. Now everything looks like a MacBook, a "plastic" case might even be an attraction, colours could be great! The thermals, without a fan presumably, would still be comfortably better than an iPhone so sustained performance would be better.
I can see a place for this as an entry machine, particularly if Applezulu is right about prospects in education too.
I suspect it's intended to compete with Google's Chromebooks in the K-12 market. That'd put the price in the $300 range when sold in bulk to schools. Competition with iPads and MacBooks will be reduced by not marketing it to the public. And I suspect the screen will be low-quality.
There is a large, untapped, market for a low cost, entry level Mac. As others have mentioned, this includes elementary students and many senior citizens. There's a lot of people who are not power users. They want to surf the web, send/receive email, watch videos, listen to music, look at their photos, and not much else.
Many families would like to have everyone in the house on the same platform. That makes things easier. Macs are known for security and ease of use, which appeals to parents and seniors. Built-in parental controls are also a plus.
With cloud storage, you don't even need a lot of onboard storage. Today's school kids use Google Drive, or similar for their schoolwork.
An A series processor is likely more than enough for this market. If Apple can keep the price low enough, they will have a real winner on their hands.
Of course, I am jaded. My first Mac had a full 512K of RAM and I added a 10MB hard drive. I am amused when I hear claims that 8GB isn't enough for a basic, bare bones computer.
They'd be suitable for any general use cases but definitely popular with students. Even entry-level Apple Silicon is really fast. iPhone chips are essentially 1/2 the entry M-series chips of the same generation.
A18 Pro is roughly 1/2 M4 and around the same as M1.
This would be like Apple selling an old M1 Air at $100-150 less than the entry Air that uses half the power. This would be $649-699 for education buyers.
They could perhaps create a better “iPad + keyboard” combo that offers an attractive package. But Apple already sells three kinds of laptops and three kinds of iPads. Why confuse the consumer with another one that overlaps both classes?
They could perhaps create a better “iPad + keyboard” combo that offers an attractive package. But Apple already sells three kinds of laptops and three kinds of iPads. Why confuse the consumer with another one that overlaps both classes?
The difference is that it would be a Mac. At this point the defining attribute that differentiates a Mac from an iPad is that the Mac runs Mac OSX.
Mac OSX allows a greater flexibility in available software. With additional software, OSX can even run Windows in a virtual machine.
OSX is a platform that can be used to teach programming. To my knowledge, Apple doesn't allow users to write traditional software under iPad OS. I have a C compiler for my Mac, I have not been able to find one for my iPad.
Similarly, OSX allows one to drop into the command line and explore a bit to see how the machine works under the hood. I don't think the iPad allows this.
You can even run iPad apps on a Mac.
All of these make OSX a better choice for many educational situations.
Seems like they could just put an M1 in it if they wanted a cheaper Mac....What I don't want to see if Apple start this race to the bottom with "cheap" devices. Apple is a premium brand and should be treated as such. They may be pricing some people out but that's just how it goes. I can't afford a BMW or Mercedes Benz but that doesn't mean they should be making $25,000 BMW's or Mercedes Benz's. It just cheapens the brand in the end.
That being said if they can keep quality up and use some older SoC's such as the M1 then why not? They make a $500 Mac mini that seems to be good quality however making a $500 Mac mini is a lot different than making a $500-600 MacBook as it has a keyboard/mouse, and screen.
I could see this being popular in K-12/College education. Sorta like the eMac of its time, only a laptop instead of a desktop.
Seems like they could just put an M1 in it if they wanted a cheaper Mac....What I don't want to see if Apple start this race to the bottom with "cheap" devices. Apple is a premium brand and should be treated as such. They may be pricing some people out but that's just how it goes. I can't afford a BMW or Mercedes Benz but that doesn't mean they should be making $25,000 BMW's or Mercedes Benz's. It just cheapens the brand in the end.
That being said if they can keep quality up and use some older SoC's such as the M1 then why not? They make a $500 Mac mini that seems to be good quality however making a $500 Mac mini is a lot different than making a $500-600 MacBook as it has a keyboard/mouse, and screen.
I could see this being popular in K-12/College education. Sorta like the eMac of its time, only a laptop instead of a desktop.
I would love to see eMate back and for it to use iPadOS 26 now that the OS has windows. A18 Pro with 3nm and ray-tracing is too much of a processor for this thing. Go with A16 on 5nm instead. Limit it to 8 GB but make it fun to use. And one bold suggestion... drop the Retina Display. Get this thing down to $500 with keyboard, touch, rugged plastics, 8/128 storage, and 6 hours battery life.
It would be something new. Something for all ages and those not capable of/interested in paying $1k for a laptop.
Comments
For sure Apple is intimately familiar with A-series SoC capabilities and limitations. The benefits of releasing a Mac with an A-series SoC are probably A.) lower cost and B.) lower power consumption.
The A-series SoCs have plenty of performance for the average user: iPhones have been editing 4K video for a decade now and that's probably the heaviest normal workload for Joe Consumer. It's not like office suites, e-mail, content consumption or web browsing require more horsepower.
Presumably a lower price MacBook would open up more opportunities for enterprise/education sales where 3D gaming performance is not performance metric. A lower power SoC would result in better battery performance which might lead to a thinner form factor.
These low cost laptops will get the LCD.
My guess these laptops are for low cost education market (think eMac remember those!) and using the orders they have to make well in advance.
There's money to be saved by using a slower SSD, just 256GB presumably. Ditto on display quality. Smaller trackpad?
Once upon a time, only upmarket Mac notebooks had metal cases, the rest had polycarbonate, so that's a possibility too. Now everything looks like a MacBook, a "plastic" case might even be an attraction, colours could be great! The thermals, without a fan presumably, would still be comfortably better than an iPhone so sustained performance would be better.
I can see a place for this as an entry machine, particularly if Applezulu is right about prospects in education too.
Many families would like to have everyone in the house on the same platform. That makes things easier. Macs are known for security and ease of use, which appeals to parents and seniors. Built-in parental controls are also a plus.
With cloud storage, you don't even need a lot of onboard storage. Today's school kids use Google Drive, or similar for their schoolwork.
An A series processor is likely more than enough for this market. If Apple can keep the price low enough, they will have a real winner on their hands.
Of course, I am jaded. My first Mac had a full 512K of RAM and I added a 10MB hard drive. I am amused when I hear claims that 8GB isn't enough for a basic, bare bones computer.
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=iOS&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=iGPU&hwname=Apple%20A18%20Pro%20GPU&did=123295110 (A18 Pro)
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS%20X&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=GPU&hwname=Apple%20M4&did=123984676 (M4)
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS%20X&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=GPU&hwname=Apple%20M1&did=90754264&D=Apple%20M1 (M1)
A18 Pro is roughly 1/2 M4 and around the same as M1.
This would be like Apple selling an old M1 Air at $100-150 less than the entry Air that uses half the power. This would be $649-699 for education buyers.
Mac OSX allows a greater flexibility in available software. With additional software, OSX can even run Windows in a virtual machine.
You can even run iPad apps on a Mac.
That being said if they can keep quality up and use some older SoC's such as the M1 then why not? They make a $500 Mac mini that seems to be good quality however making a $500 Mac mini is a lot different than making a $500-600 MacBook as it has a keyboard/mouse, and screen.
I could see this being popular in K-12/College education. Sorta like the eMac of its time, only a laptop instead of a desktop.
A18 Pro with 3nm and ray-tracing is too much of a processor for this thing. Go with A16 on 5nm instead. Limit it to 8 GB but make it fun to use.
And one bold suggestion... drop the Retina Display. Get this thing down to $500 with keyboard, touch, rugged plastics, 8/128 storage, and 6 hours battery life.
It would be something new. Something for all ages and those not capable of/interested in paying $1k for a laptop.