The “low-cost MacBook” rumor just won’t die, but it might finally make sense

If you need a Mac laptop computer, you often must be able to spend at the very least $1,000. Whether we’re speaking concerning the white plastic MacGuide from 2006, the 11-inch MacGuide Air from a decade in the past, or the fashionable M1 MacGuide Air, the listing value for Apple’s most cost-effective MacGuide is often inside $100 or so of that four-digit value barrier (not counting refurbished Macs or ones that go on sale).

Apple has a acknowledged aversion to releasing less-expensive {hardware} just to hit a beautiful value—”low cost is for different individuals as a result of we attempt to construct a greater product,” Apple advertising and marketing SVP Greg Joswiak instructed us just a few years in the past. But rumors of a low-cost MacGuide pop up each few years, undeterred, often conflating “entry-level” with “low-cost.” Here’s a prediction about an $800 MacGuide from October 2008 (precise entry-level costs: $999 and $1,299). Here’s analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in 2018 predicting a MacGuide Air “with a lower cost tag” that might “reignite gross sales” (precise value: $1,199, $200 greater than the earlier MacGuide Air).

This week, Kuo got here again with an up to date model of that very same report, claiming that Apple “might also think about (but hasn’t determined but) introducing a extra reasonably priced MacGuide mannequin to spice up shipments.” Mac income and unit shipments have certainly been down year-over-year for just a few quarters, although that has extra to do with a pandemic- and Apple Silicon-fueled gross sales spike in 2021 and 2022 than something (the income numbers are nonetheless on the excessive aspect of regular in comparison with 2019 and most of 2020).

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Apple follows via with this determination and that Kuo is right in characterizing this new MacGuide as “extra reasonably priced [than current offerings]” fairly than “an all-new providing in the identical value window that entry-level MacBooks have occupied for years.”

A less expensive MacGuide—name it a $600-to-$800 value window, like Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go and a few of the higher “Chromebook Plus” laptops that Google just introduced—arguably makes extra sense now than it has at any level within the latest previous. That’s partly due to Apple Silicon, partly as a result of Apple retains purpose-built entry-level merchandise in most of its different lineups at this level, and partly due to how Apple’s enterprise has shifted in the previous couple of years.

Apple is aware of how one can do a less-expensive product

Consider the $429 iPhone SE. It’s clearly lesser than the “common” iPhones, with its smaller display screen, shorter battery life, and barebones digital camera setup (to the couple of people that e-mail me about Touch ID each time I knock the nine-year-old SE design, your objection has been famous). It’s additionally clearly costlier than what passes for a funds cellphone in Android land, the place competent-if-unexciting brand-name choices will be had for $200 or much less.

And but to the cash-strapped cellphone purchaser, it gives many of the key options of an iPhone, beginning at round half the value of the iPhone 15, the present mainstream flagship. It’s positioned in a means that permits it to offer the iPhone expertise whereas minimizing how a lot it cannibalizes gross sales of costlier variations.

Products like this exist in a few different locations in Apple’s lineup. The most distinguished is the $329 iPad, which regardless of its age nonetheless does crucial iPad issues at round half the value of an iPad Air (that is additionally true to a lesser diploma of the oddball $449 Tenth-gen iPad). The primary $599 Mac mini additionally arguably occupies this place in Apple’s desktop lineup, relative to the $1,299 iMac, the $1,299 M2 Pro Mac mini, or the $1,999 M2 Max Mac Studio.

So in a means, the MacGuide is definitely an outlier in Apple’s lineup, the one considered one of its main product strains the place there is not some type of workable possibility effectively underneath $1,000.

Another essential factor about these low cost iPads is that purchasing one plus a first-party keyboard case prices between $500 and $850, roughly the identical vary we’re concentrating on for our imagined low-cost MacGuide. And as a result of the iPad and Mac stay so distinct even after years of drifting nearer collectively, these iPad-laptops aren’t robotically serving the identical individuals who could be served by a Mac laptop computer in the very same value vary.

So Apple “[doesn’t] do low cost,” as Joswiak instructed us. But that does not imply it’s completely incapable of delivering a meaningfully less-expensive product that also meets its requirements for design high quality, software program expertise, and revenue margin.