According to the latest news shared by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, Apple will launch the 15-inch MacBook Air with a larger screen size this year, but will not launch the 12-inch MacBook with Apple Silicone.
Gurman did not reveal any other details about the 15-inch MacBook Air. But Ross Young, CEO of screen supply chain consulting firm DSCC, has said that Apple’s suppliers will begin producing 15.5-inch screen panels for the MacBook Air in the first quarter of 2023, so he speculates that Apple will launch the notebook at a special spring event.
The MacBook Air just underwent a redesign in 2022, so the 15-inch model will be similar or identical in appearance to the existing 13-inch model and will likely feature the M2 and M2 Pro chips.
Gurman previously said Apple had planned to launch a 12-inch MacBook in late 2023 or early 2024, but he said today that the model is no longer on Apple’s recent roadmap.
Apple has released low-end and high-end 12-inch notebooks in the past. At the low end, Apple introduced a slim 12-inch MacBook that weighed just two pounds in 2015, but the notebook was discontinued in 2019. And on the high end, Apple offered a 12-inch PowerBook G4 in the mid-2000s.
Previous 12-inch MacBooks were thermally constrained by the use of Intel processors, but Apple’s Apple Silicon has superior performance per watt, and Apple should theoretically be able to reintroduce an ultra-thin, fanless MacBook if it decides to do so.
