I’m restarting this blog for no particular reason other than that I like writing and I still am figuring out new things about tech stuff and sometimes I feel like writing about them. If you enjoy it, super. If you don’t, it’s ok, I still like you.

Today, I’m gonna migrate someone with a 2016 12-inch MacBook to a new MacBook Air, which is gonna be about 30 thousand times faster, so good for her. I’m gonna tell you how I plan to do that in some other post, but first I am going to indulge myself with a digression.

I really miss the design of the 12-inch MacBook — it was sooooo thin and sooooo light (only 2 pounds!) — and now they have the perfect chip to bring it back (I mean, the MacBook Neo has an iPhone chip in it, ffs), but they won’t. 11-inch MacBook Air; iPhone 12/13 mini; 12-inch MacBook: all tiny things of beauty. But people didn’t buy them in the numbers Apple wanted, even though many of us love ultra-portable design. Though apparently not enough of us. (I’m also willing to bet that I have a distorted perspective in NYC, where people live in small spaces, and usually don’t have cars, and thus need to carry things around.)

The 12-inch MacBook had the following problems, from my perspective:

• It was the first Mac to feature the notoriously unreliable, uncomfortable, and noisy “butterfly mechanism” keyboard that Apple put in their laptops from roughly 2015-2019. (I got meaningful class action money from that keyboard sucking so hard, I’m pleased to report.) They invented it in order to be able to have an even thinner machine, but it never worked well, and they reverted to their traditional “scissor mechanism” keyboard in 2020.
• It had a teeny tiny hamster wheel of a processor, from Intel’s gimped “mobile” series, and that still ran hot when you tried to do almost anything with it. And, as the machine lacked a fan, again in the name of thinness, the processor would, all the time, get throttled to sleepy hamster speeds in order to cool down. The 12-inch MacBook was a real underperformer. Great conceptual design, but if they’d waited six years and put an M1 chip in it, that processor would probably have performed well. The Intel processor they used did not, at all.
• Apple didn’t discontinue the 13-inch MacBook Air, which was a much better performer (but with a much worse quality display), and sold it for less. This had the dual effect of destroying anything “Air” was supposed to mean in terms of thin and light, and probably depressed sales of 12-inch MacBook. They should have renamed the 13-inch MacBook Air to be “MacBook”, and called the 12-inch MacBook “MacBook Air” and then it all would have made sense: basic machine, small and light machine with a better display for a premium.
• They made an annoying “it’s kind of like an iPad” decision: one lonely USB-C port for everything, including power. If you want to attach anything else and power, then you need a hub that can pass through power. Not the end of the world, but, irritating. And, also, no Thunderbolt support, making it the only Mac model since 2011 that didn’t offer it…until the MacBook Neo.

But man, was it gorgeous. Wish they’d bring it back, now that they could.

Image by Maurizio Pesce – https://www.flickr.com/photos/pestoverde/17182400279, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47277910