- The Awful 12-inch MacBook
I despise the hideous 12-inch MacBook (also known as Retina MacBook or the new MacBook).
Apple are renowned for their fantastic design, but this series of laptops was a resounding misfire. The 12-inch MacBook is certainly the ugliest Mac and is in the running for one of the ugliest laptops in general. Especially in gold, it looked awful.
The keyboard is disgusting. To squish it onto a 12″ frame, Apple extended it right to the edges of the chassis, and it just looks haphazard. The Air’s minimum 13″ size allows for a slight border, which makes the whole device look so much nicer. That, of course, isn’t to mention the horrid functionality of the keyboard. To achieve the pointlessly thin design, Apple invented the ‘Butterfly Keyboard’ with a mechanism departing from the traditional scissor style. The design was flawed, and people were quick to experience issues due to heat and detritus.
Speaking of heat, that was a problem too. Also in pursuit of thinness, and despite the use of hot-running x86 Intel chips, the models were fanless. They naturally overheated and were incapable of anything even slightly strenuous. The compromise in desire for thinness didn’t cease there, however, for it continued into the sole USB-C port. Charging your laptop? Well, unless you’ve got a dongle, you won’t be able to plug in a mouse, drive, or external display. If you do have a bulky dongle, does it not defeat the sole value of such an unreasonably thin laptop?
I personally think this terrible Mac line set back Apple’s laptops by years. In typical Apple fashion, they refused to acknowledge their mistake and kept producing the computers for years, making only half-baked attempts to address the intrinsic problems. Apple didn’t manage to get things back on track until 2020 with Apple silicon. The cooler-running M series chips would ironically have made the 12-inch MacBook a not completely unreasonable proposition, but by the time it released, Apple had already canned the line.