So for about a year, the Great Mentioner has been kicking around the closest thing to a surefire recession indicator: a cheap Apple laptop. What makes this interesting is that for the first time in almost twenty years, it would be a purpose-built inexpensive laptop rather than last generation’s base model for the low. In fact, if the Great Mentioner is to be believed, it is built around the chipset of the iPhone 16 series – in other words, the same A18 SoC that drives my mobile phone.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggests that’s the minimum RAM and firepower required for Apple Intelligence, which is the table stakes for Cupertino hardware these days: 8 GB RAM (or a thousand times as much as my first Mac) and processor performance somewhere between the M1 and M3 (which in turn would make it comparable with my work laptop). Not to mention the economy of scale that comes with having been punching this chipset out for two years already, although one wonders how it scales up to a larger display. The Great Mentioner has it on 12.9”, slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, which means that we are looking at that most unexpected of things: a return of the Scottish Laptop, the MacBook, only with far more firepower than a Core M and with a price point commensurate with that power. And possibly even more than one single port, an undersupported USB-C, which meant at the time that there was no way to buy a MacBook and an iPhone and connect them.
I don’t really need and can’t justify a personal laptop. That said, a personal laptop would not have to do that much – Signal, MarsEdit, Safari for streaming, maybe Zoom or Facetime, and Kentucky Route Zero – assuming that there’s any way to run it when Rosetta support for Intel code goes away in two years. It would also mean, once and for all, the complete obliteration of any personal data on my work laptop for good. And the A18 in the body of a 12” laptop should have functionally infinite battery life.
Basically this would be the iPhone 16 in laptop form. Which…you could do worse, especially for less than the price of the iPhone 16. My only concern is that the notional price point will suffer from the AI-driven hyperinflation of RAM costs, and then, do you really want to invest in a laptop with only 8 GB of RAM in 2026? Especially when it has to run macOS and not iOS? If this is really the plan, shouldn’t the plan be a 10” iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? And yet, that was a clearly inferior solution to an actual laptop in Prague two years ago.
Something to mull over, anyway.