Display Analyst Ross Young Thinks a 15-Inch Consumer MacBook Is Coming

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

The full report is limited to those in the display industry who subscribe, but display analyst Ross Young provided a bit of color on what can be expected. Apple is working on a MacBook Air that’s somewhere around 15 inches in size, with the machine set to debut alongside a “slightly larger” 13-inch MacBook Air.

According to Young, the larger-sized 15-inch MacBook Air is slated for release in 2023, but a specific launch date unknown. This is not the first time that we’ve heard about a 15-inch MacBook Air, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said last year that Apple was working on a larger MacBook Air with a 15-inch display size. [...]

Internal Apple emails that came out during the Epic Games v. Apple trial also indicate that Apple considered a larger 15-inch MacBook Air as early as 2008, but instead went with the smaller 13-inch model.

Out of all the devices Apple could make but doesn’t, the one that I think might prove the most popular is a big consumer MacBook. Apple has never made a 15-inch or larger laptop that wasn’t a pro-specced and pro-priced MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Surely there are a lot of people out there who would buy a MacBook Air with a 15-inch display if one existed. Plus, now that the latest MacBook Pros have gained a wee bit of thickness and weight in the interest of better serving pro users’ needs, there’s room for a thinner, lighter large-display MacBook to stand out. But why wait for 2023? I’d love to see such a thing appear later this year, when M2 MacBooks are unveiled.

The current MacBook Air (13 inches) starts at $1000. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2000. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2500. So the missing MacBook is a 15-inch MacBook Air that starts at $1500. There must be some number of 16-inch MacBook Pro buyers who really do buy them just to get the big display, and they’d spend around $1000 less if a large-display consumer MacBook were available. But I can’t help but think Apple could make up for the lost revenue from those customers by upselling more MacBook Air buyers on a larger screen.

“The largest display option is only available in the pro models” is true for iPads and iPhones too, of course. But rumors strongly suggest that the iPhone 14 will appear with 6.1- and 6.7-inch sizes in both the Pro and non-Pro models. A big-screen non-Pro MacBook would follow that same pattern.

★ Thursday, 24 March 2022