Apple Continues Its Slow March Toward the MacPad Future
Will Apple ever ship a MacBook laptop with a touchscreen? Most likely not. But next week, Apple will begin shipping a device that closely resembles a MacBook with a touchscreen.
To be clear, Apple didn’t show off a MacBook during Tuesday’s virtual product launch event. But it did show off a tablet that feels a lot like a computer. (“What’s a computer?” you ask. We'll get to that.) Apple's new device is the 2022 iPad Air, the fifth generation of this product line. A few of its features have been updated to keep with the times: 5G connectivity, an ultrawide camera, a USB-C port.
But the upgraded silicon at its heart is what makes it more Mac-like. The most significant upgrade to the iPad Air is its M1 chip, the same Apple-made processor that’s in the 2020 MacBook Air, the 2020 MacBook Pro, the 2021 iMac, and the 2021 iPad Pro. The M1 might already be aging by Apple’s speedy standards, seeing how the company is already putting M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips into its high-end hardware. But the inclusion of the M1 in the iPad Air, a tweener of a device that was always more expensive than the most basic iPad and less powerful than the most souped-up iPad, means yet another Apple tab has been elevated to “PC” status.
