The Upside Of Slower

The insanity of the new MacBook making you angry

M.G. Siegler Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 12, 2015

Two steps forward, one step back. In the history of Apple product iteration, we see this time and time again. The iMac gets insanely thin, but no optical drive. The iPad 3 gets a retina display, but is slightly heavier. The iPhone 6 gets extremely thin and maintains a great camera, but the bulge. Etc.

The latest such trade-off was unveiled this week. The new MacBook is almost impossibly thin, but it only has one port, an older front-facing camera, and a slower processor. And so on. In quite a few peoples’ minds it seems to be one step forward and two steps back.

Which is insane.

This is the price of progress, people. Would I like a MacBook that is as thin as possible and weighs two pounds but is as powerful as a MacBook Pro? Of course. And we’ll get that in a few years. But it takes time. So we can either wait, or accept certain trade-offs now. Sadly, you still cannot have your cake and eat it too.

The good news is that you don’t have to buy the new MacBook now if you don’t want to. Apple is not only still selling their MacBook Airs and Pros, but they upgraded them as well with some newer, faster internals. They’re even available now (versus a few weeks for the new MacBook); have at it!

Me? I’ll be getting the new MacBook. Performance specs aside, it seems like the exact laptop I’ve been waiting for. Do I care about the one port? Not really. I mean, it’s always nice to have more, of course, but I’ll gladly make that trade for a machine this small and light.

Do I care that the Intel Core M chip is likely to be slower than the Intel i5/i7 chips in my two-year old MacBook? Maybe a little, but not really. The vast majority of what I do on my machine is through a web browser. I can’t recall the last time I used a machine that wasn’t powerful enough to handle everything on the web (*insert Adobe Flash joke here*), but it was definitely more than two years ago. I’m sure I’ll be fine with this new machine.

And I’m sure 99% of the rest of the public will be as well. Graphic designers? Maybe opt for the MacBook Pro. Video editors? Maybe get the Mac Pro. But you and they already know that. Still, we’re outraged for some reason. How dare there be a trade-off!

What’s funny is that I’m wondering if there won’t be an actual upside to this trade-off beyond the usual iterative path to progress. By introducing a machine with Intel’s slower Core M chipset, might Apple also be moving us closer to a world where their own mobile chipset, the A(X) line, can step in?

We’re clearly not there yet, or you have to believe Apple would have done it. But you’d be crazy to think Apple hasn’t been experimenting with running OS X on their own chips. Remember, years before Apple made the jump from PowerPC to Intel chips, they had OS X working on those chips. Undoubtedly, the same is true here.

I’m no chip expert, but it sure feels like Apple is improving the A(X) chips faster than Intel is improving their own processors. Plus, the reliance on Intel is one of the few major dependencies Apple has left. When they can move everything fully in-house, we may see performance improve on the laptop end even faster.

And a further convergence of MacBook and iPad. Of OS X and iOS.

Unfortunately, for now, the trade off is a bit of speed, fewer ports, and a weaker camera. I’ll shed some tears for those of you up in arms about such things while staring into my glorious 12-inch retina display.

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