New MacBooks mark Apple's return to high-end laptops in age of the tablet

Apple released its latest laptops on Thursday, a new range of computers to replace the ageing range of Retina MacBook Pros. They are thinner and lighter than their predecessors, with a new touch bar at the top of the keyboard and a fingerprint sensor replacing the power button.

They are £750 more than the machines they replace were – though their price has also gone up. The larger of the two new MacBook Pros, the 15in with Touch Bar, is the first laptop the company has released with a starting price of more than £2,000 for more than a decade: it begins at an eye-watering £2,349, with build-to-order options taking it well north of £4,000.

Apple’s former cheapest laptop, the £749 MacBook, is also being retired. With the next cheapest going up in price due to post-Brexit currency swings, there is now only one Apple laptop available for less than £1,000: the £949 13in MacBook Pro, an almost two-year-old computer that is likely to never see another update.

After a long period as a mid-market manufacturer of some of the most popular laptops on the market, then, Apple is back to making premium computers for the very top end of the market.

“Apple has always had a firm strategy on the high-end of the market with adding a few models towards the mid-range to attract new user groups,” says the Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann. 

The shift has been rapid, and reflects the changing shape of the PC market, Apple’s attempts to refashion its line-up of computers and mobile devices for that altered world, and some new competition from an old foe, says Ben Wood from the analysts CCS Insight.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, looks on as guests inspect a new MacBook Pro. Photograph: Tony Avelar/EPA

“We shouldn’t forget that the last significant update to the MacBook Pro family was 2012,” he says. “I think it’s a real indication of the broader malaise in the notebook market that Apple was able to get away with selling a four-year-old product as successfully as it has. All they had to compete with was some nasty black plastic from Dell or HP.”

But over those four years, the PC market has shrunk consistently. In 2015, 164.4m units were sold, according to TrendForce, while that is expected to fall to 157.4m this year. The cause is obvious: the rise of mobile and table computers have allowed users to do more with less, be that replacing a laptop with an iPad, or simply never buying a full computer in the first place and going online with a smartphone.

Different companies have responded in different ways: first, by focusing less on their computer divisions as they chased the market to mobile, but later, by recognising that the smaller size of PC industry allows for greater segmentation of the market. One of the first to really push that to its limits was Apple’s old foe Microsoft.

Apple’s motivation to redefine its laptops may also have been driven by a desire to more fully distinguish between its iPads and its MacBook range. Until last week, the most expensive iPad, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Wi-Fi and mobile data, was more expensive than Apple’s cheapest laptop. That posed a problem for Apple, which struggled to explain what the two devices were for: if a laptop is best for work on the move, who would pay more for an iPad? 

Now, it can more consistently structure its messaging: iPads are cheaper, hardier portable devices with all-day battery life, but if your main computer is to be portable, a premium laptop is the way to go.