Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Air might portend the end of configurable Macs

“While the focus on Apple’s smooshing together of its platforms has been primarily about the software (iOS apps running on the Mac) and hardware (the potential of future Macs running Apple-designed ARM processors), the new MacBook Air got me thinking about another way Apple’s approach to iPads and iPhones may dramatically change how we shop for Macs in the future,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld.
“The new $1,199 base-model MacBook Air comes with a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz. If you max out all of its specs, on the other hand, you’ll walk away with a $2,600 computer… with the very same 1.6GHz processor,” Snell writes. “The new iPad Pro comes in a single processor option, the A12X. The iPhone XR and XS are powered by the A12. That’s it.”
“This feels like the future of the Mac, certainly on the consumer end of the product line,” Snell writes. “If Apple starts building Macs with ARM processors, is it going to want to offer different classes of processors within those models? On iOS, Apple has steadfastly refused to do this. Every model-year of a given model is generally powered by the same processor across the board.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Snell also speculates that “RAM feels like a configuration option that might very well disappear when Apple makes the move to ARM. Instead, Apple will pick a RAM configuration that feels right for a given product, and stick with it.”
This would be a issue because until the most-recent top-of-the-line iPad Pro’s 6GB RAM, every single iPad Apple has ever produced lacked enough RAM to rally handle a professional workflow. Some people work across myriad apps, multiple tabs, etc. and need sufficient RAM – more RAM that whatever Apple imagines “the average user” would require. We’d hate to be forced to buy the highest storage option just to get enough RAM to work with, especially if we don’t need that storage.