Why oh why does the base MacBook Air that Apple sells have their latest generation chip, the M4? That's so overkill for the vast majority of people, and I'd bet that most of them wouldn't even notice the speed difference in their day-to-day tasks. Sure, maybe my browser opens in 0.4 seconds instead of 0.7 seconds, but it's effectively instant either way. Hell, I bet you could put these side by side and have people do their daily tasks on both and they wouldn't be able to tell you which was the M1 and which was the M4. Us nerds could figure it out and we could do some benchmarks to show a difference, but that M1 is still a performance champ.

I'm being facetious, of course, but I'm advancing the same arguments I hear against Apple adding higher refresh rate displays to more of their devices. The difference is negligible, most people can't tell, it's just nerds and power users who care, etc. Why should Apple waste their time improving tech that many people would be fine staying stagnant?

I think it's important to remember that technology advances and the baseline tech gets better all the time. The much maligned iPhone 16e would knock people's socks off 10 years ago, and now it's "the cheap iPhone" that some people think is too low-specced for the price Apple's asking. High refresh variable rate displays were absolutely a premium feature 5 years ago, but as I wrote recently, very budget phones are shipping with these displays today, and it's basically just $100 Boost Mobile phones at Target and iPhones that still ship with 60Hz fixed refresh displays.

Some will say you don't need to do it until people are banging down the doors for it, and as someone who does product management I appreciate that, but there are so many things Apple does to advance the iPhone that don't rise to this bar. The bezels have gotten thinner every year for the last 4 phones or so even though I have never heard someone say they thought the bezels were too big on their iPhone (at least not since the iPhone X came out). Apple obsessively calibrates their displays for color accuracy, even though we live in a world where uber saturation and contrast win out in most side-by-side comparisons with people. They're making the iPhone 17 Air thinner this year as well – who among your friends and family have said "ugh, I would buy an iPhone, but they're sooooo thick"?

Also it should be noted that even if you forget all about being able to ramp up to 120Hz, consider the battery saving value that everyone with an iPhone would appreciate in a screen that used less energy when they were looking at static content that didn't require as many refreshes per second. It's not going to double battery life or anything, but it can move the needle. It's worth noting that while the iPhone 16 Pro has a more power hungry chip and effectively identical battery capacity to the normal iPhone 16, Apple advertises upwards of 20% better battery life in the Pro phone, some of that edge coming from the screen being able to use less power at times.

So no, I don't think the MacBook Air should ship with an M1 processor until customers are screaming about how slow it is (which they really aren't, even 4+ years after it was introduced). I absolutely think they could and many, many people would be perfectly happy with them, but I think it's better that they keep advancing the tech so that everyone buying a Mac in 2025 is getting something better than what came before. The baseline technology in our computers advances and what used to be cutting edge turns into pedestrian tech down the road. Similarly, there will always be some spec on a device that becomes the point of attention. Think of the Mac line, which was berated for years about shipping with 8GB RAM – now they start with 16GB and we don't complain about that anymore, but that 256GB starting storage is going to get more side eye in the next couple years as that becomes the spec that will feel a bit behind what you want in a $1,000+ computer. There will always be things that can get better, that's why they keep making new devices.

I don't think it's a crisis or anything, and I don't think the company is going under if they don't do this now, but I keep driving this home because I want Apple customers to get better experiences and I really want to illustrate that Apple is really the only major player out there who considers higher refresh rate displays to be a premium feature you need to pay extra for. And who am I to argue: I only have an iPad Pro because I want ProMotion and I would really consider dropping down to the normal iPhones if they had it too. It's working on me!