Say what you will about Apple, but their recent MacBooks have been solid and more affordable than their offerings a decade ago. It’s great to see the prices come down to a more reasonable level.
The base specs are reasonably priced, but the RAM and SSD upgrades are still extortionate. $999 for a MacBook Air? Sure. $800 extra to add 1.75TB more SSD space? You must be joking, that's a ~700% markup over retail SSD prices, which are themselves marked up from the wholesale prices that Apple is paying.
> Say what you will about Apple, but their recent MacBooks have been solid and more affordable than their offerings a decade ago. It’s great to see the prices come down to a more reasonable level.
When I covered IT hardware companies on Wall Street, I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
Around the same time, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".
Did you have to swap any hardware to continue using it? I have a 2012 macbook pro but had to install Linux since newer versions of MacOS stopped supporting the underlying hardware.
As long as they support them 8 or so years that gives you a good 4 years with it for the low low price of $699. Besides, in 4 years, 8GB RAM will not be enough, so it'll be time to upgrade anyway.
That's not accurate. For an average user 8Gb RAM shared with the GPU and a really fast nVME bus...the RAM is just L4 Cache at this point and there's little to no penalty to using swap like there was with north bridges, south bridges and spinny disks.
The only penalty is using up your flash's write cycles; but of course, this works to Apple's favor because it means you'll need to replace this thing sooner when the flash dies. Best part? You can't easily replace the flash because it's soldered to the board.... and the amount of people that could do this repair properly is close to non-existent.
Eventually...maybe...considering the sectors get flagged and there's spare sectors to be rolled into service...and odds are the battery is the real bottleneck before the Flash becomes an issue.
Try running a browser and adobe creative suite along with a darktable/lighttable. That kind of photography workflow also fills up the tiny available storage really fast so the macs end up being unwieldly octopuses of fragile USB/thunderbolt devices. I don't do it myself, but I do do tech support for them when they go wrong. And usually it's because they run out of the paltry 8GB of ram.
I have an 2013 MacBook Pro with an Intel chip and it’s still chugging along. My wife’s basic Lenovo from 2017 has long since given up on life. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but the longevity of my Mac has really won me over.
In response to the comments regarding its "excellent value" at $699, Lenovo is currently selling its 14" ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 for $699. It comes with a Ryzen 7 6850U that roughly matches the M1 in performance[1], 16GB of LPDDR5 and a 512GB SSD. In terms of what the everyday consumer will want/need, having 8GB more RAM and 256GB more storage is arguably going to be more valuable both now and going forward.
Edit: There have been a number of comments linking to reviews suggesting really poor battery life, however these reviews clearly mention 12th gen Intel processors, with an onboard nvidia GPU in one instance. None of these reviews pertain to the laptop I mentioned above, which features a Ryzen 6850U.
> So, I get maybe, maybe, 2 hours battery life on my TP P14s Gen 3. It's only a few months old. I've had the battery replaced once but it hasn't helped.
> On the Tom's Guide web browsing battery test, the new MacBook Air lasted an epic 14 hours and 41 minutes.
Let’s assume Tom’s full of shit and the real life battery life is 50% of what their test claims. That’s still almost 4x longer battery life than the thinkpad.
> It has the nvidia card, touch screen, i7-1260p, 32GB, all drivers and bios up to date including windows 11
This is not the same laptop I was pointing to. The i7-1260p is much more power hungry than the 6850U, and having a nvidia GPU is definitely going to eat up battery as well.
The Mac keyboards have improved but there are so many more options on the Windows side it's not even funny - and I don't know if Apple has ever made a laptop with a numpad, which can be terribly important for some people.
Some manufacturers can be quite a crapshoot with the keyboard layout (fortunately that's plainly visible when shopping for a laptop), but Lenovo is pretty consistent with the ThinkPad layout, even if they're dubiously creating these low end plastic frame lines that pointlessly devalue their brand.
Nobody remembers that brand as being "IBM's laptops", they don't have that to borrow value against, they should take care of the ThinkPad line's reputation.
Apple never had a numpad on its laptops. Since the aluminum unibody design, the Apple laptops outshine all Windows laptops because of the touchpad alone. Nothing compares to it. On a Macbook I don't want to use a mouse, on a Windows laptop I don't want to use the touchpad. I've never had any touchpad that really worked for me, so without thinking about it. The fact that they still have those buttons and that I have to use two hands, or move my fingers away from the touchpad, or lift my fingers from the touchpad to tap to click - unbelievable that they haven't figured this out.
The Mac just works. The only time the touchpad doesn't work is when you need pixel precise selection like in photo editing, and even then it outshines all Windows touchpads.
All Windows laptops I've had look outdated after two years. I've had three Macbooks, the previous two 5 and 7 years, and both didn't look outdated, not even used
The body, magsafe, touchpad, no stupid privacy settings, disk encryption, no OS licensing - this laptop works for me. With Windows it's always waiting for the time that it doesn't work like expected or doesn't work at all.
I am not sure what are you talking about: Windows laptops had the same hardware and similar gestures since, at least, 2013. The vast majority of Windows laptops don't have buttons on touchpad (the Thinkpad in this thread actually does but those are buttons to be used with the "touchpoint", the antique IBM control with the red "pimple" in the middle of the keyboard, the touchpad itself supports the standard Windows Precision gestures so buttons are not needed). Using a Windows laptop at home and a Mac at work I see no difference in touchpad performance, except that Windows gesture for selection is easier to pull off than the Mac's but this could be just my preference as I mostly use Mac with a mouse anyways.
Please for the love of god… put the M3 pro in the 15” MBA already…
it’s so close to being the perfect lower-midrange laptop but the 1 external display (without closing the lid) is a dealbreaker for tons of people. The 15” chassis can handle it just fine for the burst loads the MBA is designed around, and the M3 pro is reduced in scope over the earlier variants already.
The impulse reply is “but they want you to buy the MBP!” and surely that’s missing the whole point of the laddering strategy? Why miss a chance to slot in one more tier to grind people upwards?
but yeah the MBA are literally such a good laptop that they can do this job of peeling people away from x86 while running fully passive, it is a little silly how badly the x86 stuff comes off in comparison. Some laptops check some of the boxes but the apple is just a killer laptop, great KB and trackpad, ok speakers (MBP is definitely better but air is also better than the average tinny laptop speaker), solid screen (MBP is better tho), well-supported Unix environment, etc.
2 monitors is so passé. It was necessary in the age where you could only get 16:9 monitors (due to 1080p format dominance).
Nowadays, I do far better with a 34" or 49" widescreen format. My home monitor is 32:9 and far better than any 2-monitor setup - even though my machine could easily do 3x external monitors + display.
You have to dig around a bit to see that this line has a plastic frame, what a waste of their old reputation to put this in the ThinkPad brand, but in truth it's not even deceiving anymore, it's damaged enough that few would trust the name blindly.
this is the hardware version of the (in)famous hackernews comment on Dropbox:
> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
It appears battery life is really unacceptable with the P14s, being somewhere around 2-4 hours. I don't even bring my charger to work with me, these days.
You can't look at a P14s with a 12th gen Intel processor and claim it's going to represent the battery life of a P14s with an AMD 6850U. These are totally different beasts.
Specs of the third party semiconductors are like half of what you have to look at in a laptop. As tools they are subject to a lot of wear and tear, desktop computers you can compare on pure specs, but not laptops, the plastic frame of the P14s will make your investment last way less than the metal body Macbook Air.
On that note, Lenovo leadership is being super short sighted in diluting the ThinkPad brand with these models. Didn't they use to have the IdeaPad as the product line made of less durable materials?
"You can get a Windows machine with 2x the RAM for the same price!"
is a trope that's been around for what... 15 years now? And unless you're someone who KNOWS they need the RAM (gamers, certain types of creatives, people doing certain types of development), it's proven out over and over again, they probably don't need the RAM!
You're trading off other more qualitative benefits to get that additional RAM: screen quality, battery life, heat, UI/UX "smoothness," etc. Is the added RAM worth that trade-off? I'd argue not for most users, including power users like myself; I have a base-model 15-inch M2 Air for travel, and a beefy Windows+Linux desktop at home that I can SSH/VPN into.
My view is that unless you're looking to do something really performance-sensitive (e.g., gaming), specs don't matter nearly as much as user experience: nice screen, nice keyboard and touchpad, decent battery life, good build quality. Entry-level CPUs and SSDs are so good these days that you're really not getting much by spending more on bigger numbers, unless you really care about performance-sensitive use cases.
That has a touchscreen, and isn't a bad deal for $700, depending on your use case.
It's so hard to know if it's a good quality device or if it'll feel like a cheap plastic toy, but if it has survived being on the show floor at Walmart it's probably pretty durable.
Sorry, the only use case I can come up with is if you strictly need a Windows laptop because some software only runs on Windows (e.g. a game or Matlab or something). But for practically everyone else this is a terrible purchase.
Ive got N machines around the house for various tasks but unless Im sitting at my Main Battle Station, my M1 MBA is my goto machine. Competent for more than it should be, disappears in your backpack, great screen if you don't mind the size and battery sipping architecture. This thing was hard to beat at $1K and at $699 JUST GO BUY ONE ALREADY. 8GB memory initially scared me but I have the M1 Mini and the M1 MBA with the same guts and 8GB in M1 land is NOT the same as 8GB on other architectures. I run a full featured trading platform (Trader Workstation+my own code that does the heavy lifting) and right now Im sitting at 6.2 of 8GB "used" and its snappy as could be and apparently ZERO swap is being used too.
I run an i9 MBP 16" as my main battle station and I really do think the UI experience on the M1 is snappier. One day I'll have the excuse to upgrade to the latest M* version for that too and Im looking forward to it. With the M1 you will never hear the processor fan kick on because there isn't one because its not even necessary. Im no AAPL fan boi here but this is a no-brainer 200%.
I have the M1 Max MBP at 32GB and it replaced a basically top-of-the-line Intel MBP and I couldn't be more content with it. Everything just works and works well, too well - I've not been able to justify even thinking about upgrading it, and it's almost 3 years old.
Yeah, I got 5 of these for my kids and parents in 2021 for $750. Rock solid and still worth the price as there's nothing in the price range on the Windows side that really compares.
* Apple doesn't want to break the $999 barrier on their own site, so the M1 Air is just gone
* Apple still has them (or can easily make them) where $699 is a fine price, and so is selling them to Walmart - will they appear elsewhere?
* This will be quite competitive when next to the standard laptops Walmart stocks in-store (usually a few Chromebooks in the $150-300 range, Windows for a bit more but sometimes even a $1400 one).
* The M1 has a lot of life in it, it's now 3+ years old - and works great for me still. They can probably juice it as long as they want just by adding some RAM.
I wonder if this is a "one off" or if Apple will start doing this permanently - the Apple Store is for this generation and last, and everything else, even if still made, is for partners. I don't know when Apple actually stops making various phones.
I got the M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM for £730 second hand off eBay as a backup laptop shortly after buying an M1 Pro 14”.
Then when I travelled for a few months I only took the Air with me, and it’s incredible how I could pretty much do all of my day to day development on it. The single core performance being pretty much the same is such a huge win.
After having a £3000 Surface Book 2 for a few years which is truly one of the worst devices I’ve ever owned, the M1 Air is by far the laptop I’ve got the most value out of.
I have an M1 Pro for my work computer, and it's transformed my sense of what I think I can get away with for my next personal machine. Previously I would have just maxed out specs for the chip to what I could afford. My MBP M1 is so good at what it does that I'm now seriously considering just getting an M3 MacBook Air. Still a little annoyed they ditched the wedge shape.
All of this to say that the M1 MBA at $699 feels like an amazing deal. I don't really have a need for one, but it feels like they're giving them away.
For Macs, I have long bought the slowest processor, but increased storage and RAM.
It's the storage and RAM that are potentially limiting on this offering (and I don't even know if Walmart lets you choose upgrades there, but Apple always charges unbelievable amounts for them).
I think even being a few generations old the CPU is likely to actually be fine for quite a while, even for some (but not all) specialty uses (like development).
I love my work-provided M1 MBP Max and would possibly consider getting a personal Air at this price range, but the 8gb RAM is still a no go for me, even for $699. My SO has a 2015 MBP that's still solid, and I credit that to its SSD and 16gb RAM. I can't see 8gb of RAM being usable in 2034.
For normal "office use" (web browser, an app or two) 8GB does work well enough. More RAM is always nice, of course, but the $500 you save compared to the cheapest M2 16GB Air now available is quite a bit toward the later purchase of a new laptop in 3-4 years.
Costco’s website is bad, it often doesn’t show prices (at all) until you go to the product page and login. And half the time there’s still a resident IAM token, it doesn’t ask me for a password, just wants to loop through the auth flow to get a new session token or something.
Wish we have prices like that in Europe. Same Air would be $1050 in my country currently, though that includes VAT which is afaik missing from the Walmart price which is net not gross (tax differs from state to state)
The US seems like extremely expensive for certain products, but also extremely cheaper for other products.
Still use this machine for full time + freelance dev work, alongside all my personal work (running mine + wife businesses). Also serves as my full time media consumption device.
Hasn’t missed a beat; my only “want” would be an even small form factor
Honestly, I am no longer interested in Apple due to its discontinuance of MacOS updates for older systems. My next purchase will either be a Framework or a Tuxedo.
The Asahi developers do great work, but I have heard it is not yet at the quality necessary for daily driving. I might be wrong here, however, and I will give it a try once Apple stops updating my M1.
"Lasting" and "supported" are obviously different things. How much support do you get for a laptop from 2013/2014? I guess Linux stuff can still run, but I would imagine for most folks, there's going to be a practical limit re the software they want or need to run still working on hardware that old. Software will still run, but possibly not with newer security patches. And yep, with open source you can patch some of it yourself, but that market seems niche, and yes, that's not going to be Apple for your preferences.
People like you and I unfortunately are a minority. For some reason people think that if product lasts for a few years it’s perfectly normal. Laptops should be upgradable and lasting 10-15+ years until software advances to such a degree that hardware can no longer support it.
Windows too. I recently had to toss a 10-year-old PC because the recent versions of Windows refused to install on it.
For Mac users who want to run current/recent versions of macOS on old Macs, I've successfully used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to run Sonoma on a 10-year-old Mac mini.
Knowing how hard Walmart presses their suppliers on price, I would be surprised if there wasn’t some amount of compromise between the two companies here. I haven’t looked at model numbers but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a Walmart exclusive build (or if it isn’t… either makes sense).
Walmart and Apple both have very well-earned reputations.
Kind of an "unstoppable force meets immovable object" problem here.
It may have looked like a compromise, but I feel certain that Apple walked away from the negotiation feeling that they got exactly what they wanted.
My first question though: How long will Apple continue to manufacture M1s for sale at Walmart? The M1 has a ton of life in it for normal users. Yes, 8GB, but that's still plenty for most people doing most things.
My guess is that this is a big-retail liquidation of devices Apple is ready to move on from, and not a new long-term price point. We'll see!
Even if Apple just got their normal distributor markup and nothing else, they just offloaded a metric ton of these things, got a bunch of PR, and have more visibility.
Tons of families will notice a $700 Mac, and Walmart already sells iPhones and watches, so they have worked together.
> My guess is that this is a big-retail liquidation of devices Apple is ready to move on from, and not a new long-term price point. We'll see!
I think this may have staying power. It provides a nice way of selling to a lower tier segment without impacting their higher tier offerings. It provides an on-route to the Apple computing ecosystem for those on slightly lower incomes who would otherwise have to go with the equivalent Windows laptop. Winning at that level gets people deeper into the Apple ecosystem earlier, and more likely in the future to stay in that ecosystem if their economic situation changes (classic example would be budget conscious students)
Good points, and there is precedent right in the Apple ecosystem.
I think it's brilliant that "last year's model" (iPhone, iPad) drops down the good-better-best chain with every product refresh. No new R&D or tooling, still a great product.
There will always be a steady supply of last years' models. And customers to buy them. Apple just has to feel confident that a $700 M1 isn't cannibalizing their $1200 M2s or the upcoming M3s.
No, they dictate the MSRP and may not give you discounts if you violate it, but if you check Best Buy they always are at the Apple Store prices, or lower (often lower) - sometimes even so low as to beat out Apple refurbished with new.
What signs do you have here that this is "promotion"?
Apple selling a modern laptop for $699 is indeed worthy of curiosity as it relates to the consumer tech landscape -- which is a theme for this website.
It might not interest you, which is fine, but in that case keep scrolling! Not every post about consumer tech is "promotion".
