For years there has been talk of Apple launching an “inexpensive laptop.”
Three sources believe this will happen
When laptops came out, the answer was the MacBook Air, a much more expensive series of laptops at $1,000 versus $200 to $400 netbooks. We all know what happened: laptops disappeared (they continued to exist from 2007 to 2013), and the Air series became Apple’s most popular laptop series.
Rumors of a cheaper Apple laptop were mainly linked to the student and school market, but Apple’s answer was the iPad, not laptops.
But then a rumor emerged from Digitimes that Apple was supposedly launching a cheap laptop. The reason we don’t quote Digitimes is because it’s not credible, but there are now two sources thinking the same thing, and there are details in the alleged discoveries.
How about a laptop for 10,000 NOK?
Because according to news aggregator “yeux1122”, picked up by MacRumors, there are many in the company’s production network who think they know this: There will be cheap 12-inch and 13-inch MacBooks that will cost $700 or less.
Apple’s current cheapest model with an M1 chip and a 13.3-inch display costs $14,490 – if the price is around NOK 7,000 in the US (the reason for this particular price is because the fastest Chromebooks fall into the same price bracket), can Apple manage that? It reached a price of 10,000 Norwegian krone in Norway.
The third source is Ming-Chi Kuo who believes the same thing, and that Apple aims to sell between eight and 10 million of these mobile devices annually. Analysts believe that Apple will be able to sell about 26 million MacBook Air devices in 2022.
Maybe there’s a new 12-inch Apple device coming out, which won’t be marketed specifically to students, but will still be a favorite with this user segment? The ultra-thin 12-inch device was introduced in March 2015, but dropped in the summer of 2019 when the MacBook Air got a “Retina” display.
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