And they could do what, given that Intel was their only option at the time? Not built it?

Not to mention tons of people love them...

They could have used lower power Intel chips. Nobody forced them to put 45W chips in a paper thin chassis, but their marketing guys really wanted to have the top of the line Intel chips in them despite the wattage.

What did you expect would happen?

It would be like Apple putting the chip from the Mac Studio in the Air.

They did use low power chips. They had core M CPUs (later rebranded i5-i7 because OEMs). These were 4.5W TDP chips, even the best i7 in the 2017 model (i7-7Y75). The ONLY chips Intel had with lower power usage at the time were the significantly slower Atom and Atom derivatives.

>They could have used lower power Intel chips

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)

Arguably the customers forced Apple to use a reasonably performing chip vs one that didn’t perform even reasonably?

There's seeing at a superficial level and seeing at a deeper level. Plenty of companies were designing, building and selling hardware using the same components and making many of the same tradeoffs. The point is Apple realised what this meant, and saw what the implications would be to try and actually address those issues.

I loved my 12" macbook and would buy an Mx one in a heartbeat. It was so small I'd forget if I had it in my bag and would have to look. I traveled all over the planet and it was super convenient. I even wrote code on it.

Yes it was slow but really, not terrible.