Do you think Apple will make a Macbook SE? And at what price point?

senttoschool · Dec 23, 2020

Argon_ said:
Offering a low storage base model on the SE device, like the base iPad, which is essentially an SE.

It's crazy to think that the Macbook SE will start with 64GB of SSD like you suggested. The $400 iPhone SE starts with 64GB. For $750, 64GB would get laughed at by every reviewer and every user. It would become a joke of the industry and the SE brand would take a huge hit.

No one is buying a $750 laptop with 64GB of un-upgradable storage in 2022.

Argon_ · Dec 23, 2020

senttoschool said:
It's crazy to think that the Macbook SE will start with 64GB of SSD like you suggested. The $400 iPhone SE starts with 64GB. For $750, 64GB would get laughed at by every reviewer and every user. It would become a joke of the industry and the SE brand would take a huge hit.

$700 phones start with the same amount of storage, and the iPad starts with half that.

senttoschool · Dec 23, 2020

Argon_ said:
$700 phones start with the same amount of storage, and the iPad starts with half that.

Which $700 phone starts with 32GB of storage? And how much is a 32GB iPad? $330 right?

Argon_ · Dec 23, 2020

senttoschool said:
Which $700 phone starts with 32GB of storage? And how much is a 32GB iPad? $330 right?

The $700 phone referred to 64GB. Oh and the iPhone mini 12 starts at $700... with 64 gigs of storage. The larger one starts at 800.

rui no onna · Dec 23, 2020

Argon_ said:
What corners do you think they'll cut for the SE. I think extremely low storage might be a possibility, given the recently refreshed base iPad; evidently, plenty of people buy 64 gig tablets.

Maybe 64, 256 options? A clean doubling of the iPad, de facto SE options.

I'm sure that many will laugh at the idea of a 64 GB storage laptop, but it's worth mentioning that this is a forum of mostly enthusiasts, and many others have different use cases than us.

iOS + cache/tmp uses around 10-12GB with iOS itself taking around 5-7GB. Even now, it's easy to feel the crunch with 32GB. With Optimize on iCloud Photos and App offloading enabled, my mom's old 32GB iPhone SE1 was usually down to ~1GB free space (that's pretty bad for SSD health).

Big Sur uses 30-40GB by itself. I reckon 64GB is a non-starter. Performance with the reduction of parallelism in NAND would suffer as well (64GB would very likely have 1/4 the sequential speeds of 256GB).

Yes, storage is cheap. I can buy a 1TB NVMe SSD for $100 yet Apple charges $400 for 768GB (1TB - 256GB) more storage.

And yes, we'll probably see slightly cheaper Macs. However, I highly doubt Apple is gonna pass on the full cost savings 1:1 in their MSRP. Much like they do now, they'll leave the heavy discounting to retailers.

senttoschool · Dec 23, 2020

Argon_ said:
The $700 phone referred to 64GB. Oh and the iPhone mini 12 starts at $700... with 64 gigs of storage. The larger one starts at 800.

Just because the iPhone 12 starts at 64GB, doesn't mean that a laptop should. I've wrote about how phones and tablets can only use storage upgrades to upsell people. Macs can use storage, RAM, GPU cores, and CPU cores.

It makes no sense for a Mac to have 64GB. The Big Sur upgrade installer requires 35GB for god sakes. MacOS installation itself takes up 15GB. And then MacOS reserves additional space for RAM swaps.

It makes even less sense for a laptop to have un-upgradeable 64GB of storage in 2022.

We've already determined that SSDs cost dirt cheap and does not hinder Apple's ability to sell a $750 laptop. 256GB probably costs Apple $5.

Apple will make the differentiation between the Macbook SE and the next model up in different ways. Saying that a $750 laptop in 2022 will come with 64GB of SSD storage is lunacy.

Argon_ · Dec 23, 2020

senttoschool said:
Just because the iPhone 12 starts at 64GB, doesn't mean that a laptop should. I've wrote about how phones and tablets can only use storage upgrades to upsell people. Macs can use storage, RAM, GPU cores, and CPU cores.

It makes no sense for a laptop to have 64GB. The Big Sur upgrade installer requires 35GB for f sakes. MacOS installation itself takes up 15GB. And then MacOS reserves additional space for RAM swaps.

It makes even less sense for a laptop to have un-upgradeable 64GB of storage in 2022.

We've already determined that SSDs cost dirt cheap and does not hinder Apple's ability to sell a $750 laptop. 256GB probably costs Apple $5.

Apple will make the differentiation between the Macbook SE and the next model up in different ways. Saying that a $750 laptop in 2022 will come with 64GB of SSD storage is lunacy.

It seemed to be the most obvious fat trimming measure when SE-ing the current air, and a way to get people to upgrade, as you pointed out.

And given how little storage 64GB is, I hope you're right.

senttoschool · Dec 23, 2020

Argon_ said:
It seemed to be the most obvious fat trimming measure when SE-ing the current air, and a way to get people to upgrade, as you pointed out.

And given how little storage 64GB is, I hope you're right.

The whole point of an SE product is to provide value and offer 80% of the experience of products that cost 2-3x as much.

64GB is not an acceptable experience on a Mac in 2020, let alone 2022. It'd almost be technically unfeasible since the Big Sur installer requires 35GB today and future installers will require even more. Macs get supported for ~7 years which means a Macbook SE needs to be able to install 7 future OS updates.

It would become a joke of the industry and the SE brand would take a huge hit.

Let's just end the discussion for a 64GB SSD Macbook SE.

Robospungo · Dec 31, 2020

senttoschool said:
The iPhone 8 launched at $700. The iPhone SE, with the exact same internals as the iPhone 8 except an even faster SoC, launched at $400.

Why can't Apple shave $250 off the Macbook Air in two years and release it as the Macbook SE? What are the fundamental reasons you think Apple can't do this?

It’s not a matter of “can’t”. I just think they won’t. I’ll be glad if I’m wrong, but I highly doubt it.

Robospungo · Dec 31, 2020

Jouls said:
macOS works perfectly fine on my wife’s MBA with 4 GB of RAM.

If you say so.

senttoschool · Mar 27, 2022