Apple Updates iPads, MacBook Air, and Mac Studio Without Raising Prices
Apple is updating its core iPads and MacBooks this week with new, aggressively priced, higher performance models. Here is some quick analysis from the road (out at Mobile World Congress)
In order of importance:
MacBook Air M4
The new, LESS expensive, more powerful MacBook Air M4 is incredibly competitive - I'll have to test this configuration, but the M4's single core performance is unmatched, and that's what drives most typical consumer use cases. The new MacBook Air now supports two monitors plus the laptop display; this may seem like a power user feature (it is) but multi-monitor setups are not uncommon. There's enough shared memory (16GB) in the base config, but most users will want to pay up for more storage; softening the blow for students and educators, .edu buyers get another $100 off. The new "Sky Blue" color should be called, "Mostly Cloudy;" [at least on video] it is barely blue. Oh well. Apple's industrial designers seem to have their color saturation tool stuck on low.
iPad (base model)
The base model iPad is the model that consumers buy when they think of "tablet." Apple established the category with the iPad, and, despite a bit of stagnation with developers, iPadOS is better supported with tablet-specific apps than Android or Amazon's off-brand version of Android. Apple is giving the base iPad a spec bump without a price hike. The A16 isn't top of the line -- it doesn't support Apple Intelligence -- and the prior gen iPad wasn't slow, but the A16 is still a welcome upgrade. The increased baseline storage, though, was badly needed.
iPad Air M3
When consumers are looking for a better tablet experience, Apple has the iPad Air. The M2 is plenty fast for tablet use, but nobody is going to complain about getting an M3 for the same money. The bigger news is a new Magic Keyboard for the Air with the cantilevered design, function keys, and more. This is still an expensive accessory. These are solid upgrades in an age of tariffs, they provide good light computing capabilities for the money, and they clearly fit into Apple's good/better/best price ladder.
Mac Studio M4 Max or M3 Ultra
The Mac Studio in any configuration is way more machine than consumers need, but it will get a lot of tech press because YouTubers are among the pros that have workloads that can benefit from it. The base Mac Studio M4 Max starts with 36GB of shared RAM, and it's a bargain if you have the workload and don't need more storage (although you can always add Thunderbolt 5 drives, that isn't a cheap upgrade today either).
The Mac Studio M3 Ultra configuration starts with 96GB of shared RAM and tops out at 512GB so any comparisons to PC workstations need to start there. You can build beastly PC systems with lots of RAM and hundreds of GPU cores but the GPUs won't have access to the system memory; depending on what you're doing, that could make the Mac a lot faster. A $4000 Mac Studio is also considerably more versatile -- and available for purchase -- than NVIDIA's $3500 DIGITS. Work on cloud-sized LLMs locally in the morning, write up your findings in Pages or Word, edit and transcode a video (or a dozen simultaneously), and play Civilization before bed. [Updated March 7 with corrected configuration pricing:] Someone is bound to configure the Mac Studio with maximum cores, RAM, and the new 16TB SSD and come up with a [$14,000] price tag. That's a fun exercise; just remember that this is the sort of configuration that colleges get a grant to purchase for their computer labs. I have a child who is a computer science AI undergrad, and it's time to start calling the donors. [This report was originally written after a briefing with Apple but before the configurations were live; my original speculation on max configuration was WAY off — by a factor of five. The max config of the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is much more reasonable for the power provided than I expected.]
Competitive Response
Apple's PC competitors knew a MacBook Air M4 was coming, though they likely didn't expect it to hit so low on the price curve. Qualcomm is leading the way in performance per watt on Windows and there are some comparably priced systems to the MacBook Air M4, but not with the M4's performance. Rivals will have to lean on storage pricing comparisons, OLED displays, and Microsoft's AI integration. Getting Recall out the door would help.
On the tablet front, Google needs to commit to both hardware and software and encourage developers with better terms, tools, and profit potential than Apple.
Some consumers will buy them -- it is the best desktop Mac you can buy -- but the Mac Studio is an professional workstation. PC rivals can pick away some of the high end consumers with gaming PCs and need to focus in on their enterprise customers to find configurations designed for specific workloads and use cases. As always, this is often defined by software.
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