Where is the Colorful MacBook?
I'm not the least bit ashamed to admit that I hate April Fools Day. First, I'm someone who values high quality information above all else.1 Second, it's stupid. Yes, I'm a grinch or whatever. I just don't find any of the jokes – especially the jokes by tech companies – funny. I used to have to cover them on this day for many years and I quickly grew to hate it. It was especially annoying when real news would actually happen, as tends to happen on this day!
Anyway, stupid day. But I have grown to enjoy knowing that I don't need to be "on" when tracking the news on April 1. And instead can peruse social media like a regular person. Such mindless scrolling brought me across, yes, an April Fools joke post today. It's better than most because as with all the best jokes, it has some truth to it – and here, it absolutely should be true.
"Apple Announces MacBook", quips Basic Apple Guy – a site/feed of fun Apple-related stuff – noting a new "12-inch Liquid Retina Display. M3. Five dual-tone unibody colours. $899." And, most importantly some beautiful shots of the device. Lickable, each one.
Of course, the product isn't real. But again, it should be!
Apple recently released their new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs with M3 chips. They seem nice. But they're also basically no different than the M2 Airs which came before them.2 That includes in performance, as the M3 chips are only slightly faster. And they certainly don't look any different than the last generation. All we get here are awfully monotone hues, there's not a lick of color to be found.
Contrast that with the iMac line, which put back on a technicolor dream coat of paint with the upgrade to the M1 chip back in April of 2021. Each and every year, everyone assumes the MacBook line will follow suit. But here we are, three years later – three iterations of the MacBook families – and all we have to show for it are 'Midnight' on the Air side and 'Space Black' on the Pro side (if you get a M3 Pro or Max chip).
I didn't upgrade to an M3 MacBook Air because I have an M2 model and Apple gave me no real excuse to upgrade. You know what would have been a great excuse? Colors. There's clearly some reason Apple isn't going down this path, but it feels weird given the iMac and the history of the iBook with colors.
And yes, I've long been in favor of dropping the 'Air' from the name and going back to simply 'MacBook'. But Apple clearly isn't doing that because they don't want to fix what isn't broken, at least with regard to sales. But with the 12-inch MacBook now extinct,3 perhaps it is time if they go down the color path again. If nothing else, it would further help differentiate from the new, cheaper MacBook Air line that Apple is making for Walmart.
Anyway, the joke continues to be on us, the consumers. Apple should do this!
1 Also, incidentally, the same reason why the past year or so of Xitter has made me so annoyed/angry. It has been ruined as a real-time information network in favor of some sort of meme hub, just like a dozen other networks. One overloaded with spam, no less.
2 Yes, you can now connect two external monitors to the machine.
3 I still want them to bring back the 12-inch MacBook (or even 11-inch Air), especially now with the M-Series chips. The only downside of the smaller MacBooks (beyond the necessarily smaller screen) was the battery life. But the M chips would undoubtedly solve for that.