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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-19, 14:22

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
Well, for starters, I feel like the current generation isn't separated from the Air very well. It's really just a more luxurious, higher-priced Air — better components, sure, but ultimately not that many distinctive features (other than the Touch Bar, which… hopefully will trickle down to the entire line-up soon, or else it'll have a really hard time gaining software adoption).
That's definitely true. I think the existence of the two-Thunderbolt-port MacBook Pro really blurs the lines there, in an undesirable way. It's easy to forget that it was that product that was originally pitched as a MacBook Air successor with a retina display, being the same size and weight and using the same 15W-class processors as the old Air. I mean, it's only $200 more than the Air. At least it has the Touch Bar now?

I feel like the original sin of Apple's laptop line, when it came to not having clear distinctions between the models, was when they decided to take the 2008 aluminum unibody MacBook and re-brand it as a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Because it really wasn't, and that set this weird precedent where you "had" to be able to get a MacBook Pro for $200 more than the base MacBook (or later, the MacBook Air).

There probably shouldn't be essentially three different MacBook Pros, and Apple probably shouldn't have two different notebooks with the same screen size that are a quarter pound apart in weight and $200 apart in price. I actually half-expected Apple to just ditch the two-Thunderbolt-port MacBook Pro models instead of update them, and honestly I would have been okay with that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
Contrast the days of the iBook and PowerBook, or the white/black MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Maybe it would help if the Air had XR-like styling, with colors and a slightly bubblier look?
I would love that, honestly.

I've thought a lot about the 12-inch MacBook's failure, because it's such a weird product. Apple was convinced they had the future of the "everyday" notebook. But people just kept on buying old non-retina MacBook Airs. And then Apple introduced the two-Thunderbolt-port MacBook Pro, for people who wanted a three-pound 13-inch notebook with a retina display, and people...kept on buying old non-retina MacBook Airs. Apple clearly thought that the problem was that neither of those products were a wedge-shaped product called MacBook Air, so they finally made a retina notebook that was as close to the old MacBook Air as they could: same name, same "iconic wedge" (as Laura Metz repeated several times in the unveiling). And then, this summer, they unceremoniously axed the 12-inch, with no real replacement.

Why didn't the 12-inch MacBook work out? It's especially confounding because the people who have 12-inch MacBooks seem to almost universally adore them.

I think the problem with the 12-inch MacBook was in part a branding problem, but not in the way Apple imagined.

When Apple introduced the first MacBook Air in 2008, they sold it alongside the MacBook and MacBook Pro as a third sort of computer, different from the entry-level MacBook and the powerful MacBook Pro. It was premium, but in a very different way from the MacBook Pro. "MacBook Air" was a second type of premium product: users understood they were paying a premium for miniaturization. It wasn't intended to be the cheap MacBook for everybody.

But then in 2010, the script flipped. The second-generation MacBook Air, with a design that was in some ways less premium than the original, replaced the MacBook as Apple's cheap MacBook for everybody. It kept the MacBook Air name, however, even though it was the Default MacBook. And then, in 2015, Apple introduced a new, more expensive, more compact notebook where users paid a premium for miniaturization. And they couldn't call it MacBook Air, because the Default MacBook was called MacBook Air, so they called it just "MacBook." It was totally backwards.

They shouldn't have convinced themselves that the 12-inch MacBook was going to be the new "everyday" notebook. A vision statement of what everyday notebooks would look like a few years down the road, sure, but it was never going to be able to get down in price to be the cheap MacBook for everybody with expensive bespoke components like terraced batteries. It was the new MacBook Air, in the 2008 sense of the brand. The 12-inch MacBook was frequently dogged for being overpriced even though there wasn't anything in the industry comparable to it. To me, that's a positioning problem.

But just as crucially, once the MacBook Air design was adjusted for the mainstream in 2010 and became the cheap MacBook for everybody, Apple should have dropped the "Air" modifier. Because there will always be an opportunity for a premium miniaturized version of a product, just like there's always an opportunity for a premium higher-performance one. They shouldn't have tried to act like the mainstream cheap MacBook was the premium miniaturized version, even if it was the same size as the previous premium miniaturized one (and smaller in the case of the 11-inch), because that just painted them into a corner. Especially with the 2018 model, the entire point of the so-called MacBook Air was that it was cheaper and had a larger screen than the more compact model, albeit at the cost of additional size and weight. The naming was completely backwards!

I'd love it if we could get back to the base MacBook being just the MacBook, and then the MacBook Air could be the super-svelte premium model. How great is it, how freeing, that the base iPhone isn't called iPhone Air? If that iPhone needs to be thicker than the higher-end models (as it currently does) it can be, without causing a weird contradiction. I get why Apple keeps using the MacBook Air name — it's hugely popular — but I'd argue that the the MacBook Air name became popular in the 2010-on era, when it really should have just been MacBook all that time. That's why I've described these positioning mistakes as original sins; they were choices made years ago that have consequences for the clarity of the line to this day.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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