Apple stopped selling its light-weight, futuristic MacBook last year. It was a 12 inch laptop with extremely underpowered internals as the laptop was designed to be thin and lightweight. However, the price of the machine was even higher than the 13” MacBook Air which used more powerful internals.
The MacBook Air uses Intel Y-series chips similar to the chips found on the deprecated 12” MacBook. However, the 12” MacBook lacked fans and was not a good machine for power intensive tasks. The 13” MacBook Air is much better in terms of running apps smoothly unlike the 12 inch MacBook.
The big question now is whether Apple will bring back the 12” MacBook as it continues to bring new things to the Mactable. The 12” MacBook could have be looked at as an experimental laptop which was not trying to satisfy customers needs. The laptop had just one USB-C Thunderbolt port which was not a practical scenario in the real world.
Apple was trying to show a glimpse of the future with the 12” MacBook and sometimes it takes multiple iterations before the perfect product is born. For example, the MacBook Air was released in 2008 was not perfect until the 2010 update which fixed most of the issues with the help of SSD.
The future of Mac is not clear. The rumour mill suggests that Apple could be moving to using ARM chips on its Macs as it continues to stop its reliance on Intel. If that is the case, then it would make a lot of sense for the company to bring back the 12” MacBook as an experimental laptop with ARM chips.
A lot of people love the 12” form factor of the MacBook as its extremely easy to carry around. It would be a wise move from Apple to resurrect it from the dead.