I sure hope they saw. They designed, built and sold the things.
Would be hard to miss those issues during their development and testing, wouldn't it?
It's not like Apple didn't know what they were selling.
Not to mention tons of people love them...
What did you expect would happen?
It would be like Apple putting the chip from the Mac Studio in the Air.
They could, but those were crap.
>What did you expect would happen?
That it would be a niche due to size, but otherwise much beloved model, whose 2022 absense is still lamented? (See comments below)
Yes it was slow but really, not terrible.
It ran windows with battery life better than macOS. It was a solid form factor. Never over heated. Great for traveling with.
I miss mine.
For sure, the weakeast point of it was the processor, which had to sacrifice too much performance to stay in the thermal budget. I guess the basic design decisions for the 12" MacbBook were made when Intel still seemed to be on track for their 10nm process. But it wasn't the only caveat with its design. It had of course the horrible butterfly keybord which would plague the Apple laptops for years and 12" is the absolute minimum screen size for doing work.
I think Apple has another laptop design < 13" coming, that could be 12". The ARM processors pretty much solve the power/performance problem. The keyboard could actually be the biggest hurdle, as it increases the body thickness. But the keyboard of the new M2 Air is just wonderful, well worth whatever it adds to the device thickness. I wouldn't even be surprised, if they don't make an ultra-thin 12" MacBook but rather a 12" MB Pro, which might be slightly thicker than the Air.
Nowadays you could stick a (maybe throttled or fewer cores to get even more battery life) M1/M2 in there, add a second USB-C port, and it would be an excellent device without any of the downsides that the original version had.
That form factor with m1/2 would be awesome! Especially to use in bed cos the screen was so nice and it was so light.
I kinda wanna get an M2 Pro but I personally dislike macOS. :(
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
For those who have being using Mac since the PowerPC days all have used this argument against X86 chips. As you all know, Apple actually had to switched from RISC chips to Intel X86 chips, before they switched back to ISAs chips now. Just saying performance is not the main reason to switch chip sets.
Apple abandoned PPC after it became obvious that laptops were going to become more popular than desktops, and the G5 cheese grater Mac Pro required liquid cooling for the dual CPU chip versions.
Apple moved from Intel to ARM for the exact same reason. Intel no longer cares about pursuing high performance with a low power draw. They have returned to the Pentium 4 strategy of performance via clock speed and power increases.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/338748-raptor-lake-to-...
If that isn't a return to the Pentium 4 strategy, I don't know what is.
Intel isn’t relying on an architecture thats about to run them into a wall like the Pentium 4’s architecture was about to, what keeping them is second is being behind on their process, and beyond that, execution.
You can argue that it's not what they "want" to be doing, but it's certainly what they are doing.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-raptor-lake-ma...
What you can't change is the reality of Intel's actions.
[1] implies that the M1 development started around 2008 - although you could also read it that the M1 was 5 years in development but that sounds a bit quick and also doesn't fit with [3] in 2014 - "Apple Testing ARM Based Mac Prototypes".
But there doesn't seem to be any other direct corroboration of the 2008 date that I can find.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oDZyOf6CW4 via [2] [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31778257 [3] https://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/25/arm-mac-magic-trackpad/
Around what time? 2015?
Maybe I could have been more clear in my original post but 2015 was the year the iPad Pro launched.
How could the “iPad Pro were getting close to Intel performance” happen in thr first version?
The very first iPad Pro was already more performant than the MacBook 12” (which also launched that same year).
Whenever Tim Cook was asked, why pretty much up until maybe a few months before the apple silicon announcement, he said there weren’t any plans to switch the mac to arm.
2015 is the year both the (Intel) 12” MacBook and the first iPad Pro were released.
These we also both entirely new form factors for Apple (and both roughly the same size).
On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was.
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.