Cupertino's Worst - Apple 12-inch MacBook Review

Tim Cook recently announced that he was stepping down as the CEO of Apple, so I figured it would be fitting to take a look at one of the more infamous products that was released under his stewardship: the 12-inch MacBook. This laptop had one goal in mind: to be as thin and compact as humanly possible while still offering a full-fledged macOS experience. Did it actually deliver? Well...

If you guys have read my posts covering the "Trashcan" Mac Pro, you'll know that I have kind of a morbid fascination with the early-Cook era of Apple from 2011 to about 2018. This was the point where Apple pivoted hard from being a rather forward-thinking tech company, to a lifestyle and services company that also happened to make phones and computers on the side. 

It was Cook's Apple that was responsible for creating arguably the worst Mac lineup since the beige malaise era of the early-to-mid-1990s. It enshrined absolutely nonsensical aesthetic-forward designs that were also updated so infrequently and half-assedly that it would probably make the US military-industrial complex blush. If you walked into an Apple Store in early-2019, you would've been graced with three desktop computers that hadn't been meaningfully updated since the Obama administration, a performance laptop saddled with gimmicks and none of the ports its users actually wanted, and a practically ancient entry-level notebook that was somehow still the most honest thing in the room.

But none of them were quite as polarizing as the 12-inch MacBook.

Source: Apple

With a run from 2015 until 2019, it was a substantially more compact and lightweight laptop than the smallest wedge MacBook Air offering of the time. Yet its $1299 starting price was substantially more expensive, despite coming with hardware that - at least on paper - was not outperforming the old Air. Based on that, it's always been hard for me to say who the hell Apple was trying to market this computer to. The size seemed to be the only real obvious selling point - but perhaps there was more to it than meets the eye.

My particular machine is the base 2017 model, which is the last revision of this machine and probably the most desirable to anybody not wanting to break the bank for one on the secondhand market. I paid just $150 for it before tax and shipping. That's quite the depreciation hit for what appears to be a relatively clean example of this computer.

Right off the bat I can say this: it's an extremely gorgeous looking piece of hardware. Disgustingly so. The distinct wedge shape is very reminiscent of the MacBook Air, albeit with the glowing fruit on the lid excised and the aluminum shell trimmed out in a really striking gold-colored anodized coating. Almost immediately, this computer looks a hell of a lot more premium than its older and slightly bigger stablemate. 

And that ethos clearly extended to the point which Apple downsized this computer compared to the 13-inch Air. It is comically thin and light - to the point where it feels both extremely luxurious and unnervingly delicate in equal measure. Like I'm afraid it might bend in half if I put it in my backpack without a sleeve, but also... just look at it! If Jony Ive designed this thing solely to look good in a bougie-ass cafe next to an overpriced latte, then by the gods did he pull it off.

Compared to a Galaxy Tab S6 Lite - the MacBook is not far off.

The 12-inch MacBook's tiny form factor does have some obvious practical benefits as well. It measures out to just 11.0" wide, 7.7 long, and 0.5" at it's thickest point with the lid closed; which is roughly in the same ballpark as a first-generation iPad Pro. That makes it an extremely easy device to take on the go - even with something like a protective sleeve.

But the real kicker is this is a real laptop! You get a proper hinged display, a keyboard base that doesn't double as some floppy display cover, and an actual desktop OS. At the time, this thing probably looked like a real enticing upsell over the much less capable iPad Pro of the era for someone that wanted the feel and familiarity of an actual Mac to go along with the size.

And they didn't skimp on the display, not one bit.

The laptop is equipped with an IPS LED "Retina" display that runs at a native resolution of 2304 x 1440 and 60 Hz. It's a very nice panel with bright lighting and vivid colors that makes images really pop. The resolution is a bit overkill at something of this size class but there's no denying that it looks incredibly sharp. I even prefer to turn the scaling back just a little bit, so the screen feels a little bigger. 

The trackpad is of Apple's own Force Touch variety and out of all the laptop trackpads I've used over the years, these are by far some of the best. The glass surface is very resistant to shine and maintains its smooth matte finish far better than a plastic topped trackpad. You can also physically press to click anywhere on the pad, something that feels glaringly absent if you go back to using a lot of other laptops.

Another party trick of this trackpad is the additional pressure stage identified by a second haptic click that triggers additional functions depending on the program. To be honest, I have yet to find a great use for it and there doesn't seem to be a way to change its behavior within the basic system settings, so I don't anticipate getting much use out of it in the future. Just as a basic pointing device though, it's a real winner.

But of course - there were also some compromises. Quite a lot, actually.

As a consequence of Aple's aggressive slimming down of the computer, the 12-inch MacBook is only equipped with two ports: a 3.5mm headphone jack - and a USB-C port that's used for both data transfer and charging. 

Yeah. A single fucking USB-C port. During the mid-to-late-2010s. When almost nobody was using USB-C for anything whatsoever.

This is such monumentally dumb design choice that to this day I still can't get over how stupid it is. Apple didn't just dump native compatibility with the vast majority of computer accessories in favor of aesthetics - they dumped it in favor of a standard that was nowhere close to widespread adoption at the time. Charging your computer while transferring files off a flash drive or an SD card? A thing of the past, unless you're okay with plugging in an abomination of a dongle to restore functionality this thing should've otherwise had from the beginning. You don't even get the benefit of MagSafe either. Now if your charging cable gets yanked, it risks damaging the one port that's used for absolutely everything - if it doesn't pull the entire computer off the table with it. 

Oh yeah, we're gonna talk about the keyboard next.

I'd be willing to wager the most lasting memory people have of this machine from the brief time they handled one in the store has got to be the infamous butterfly keyboard. In the pursuit of chasing the laptop's razor thin profile, Apple sacrificed the common scissor switch mechanism at the altar of thinness among some other very important things like... having a typing experience that isn't worth writing a few paragraphs about.

Coming from any normal laptop keyboard, the butterfly keys feel absolutely bizarre. If you're familiar with how the shallow, physical click on a laptop trackpad feels; all the keys on this keyboard feel almost exactly like that. There is near zero gradual lead in and maybe a single millimeter of key travel before bottoming out hard. I also measured about 62 - 65 grams of actuation force which is... not light. That's probably a necessary evil just to prevent typos caused by the obscenely short key travel but man; it really forces me to slow down and really hammer hard on each key. You're definitely not going to be breaking your WPM record on this thing.

And yet despite the popular consensus, I find that I don't really dislike this keyboard. I mean yeah; the heavy weighting and lack of meaningful key travel feels pretty awful by most standards, but I still find it's serviceable enough. The 2017 models are actually equipped with the second generation of the butterfly switch which aimed to fix some of the typing feel issues people had with the earlier models. That might help explain why I'm not too disgusted by this thing - because apparently the first one sucked so bad that Apple didn't have a choice but to try and improve it.

Welcome to dongle hell.

But the real reason why this switch was so widely despised wasn't just the typing feel - it was the fragility. There was apparently so little clearance under the keys that even something as tiny as a breadcrumb could absolutely murder them. And you might think "well, why can't you just pop off the keycap and clean it out?" Technically, yeah you can, it's just that Apple never endorsed an official way of doing so. Also compared to a scissor switch, you absolutely run a higher risk of breaking the keys upon removal because of how much more fragile the mechanism is.

These reliability problems were so widespread that Apple got hit with a class action lawsuit over the butterfly keyboard. They eventually settled upon a solution: which was just to replace the entire upper case assembly of a user's computer. Not really a great look for the design of your product if replacing half of the machine is somehow more cost effective than just the actual faulty part. Apple eventually gave up and just replaced the insipid thing with a traditional scissor switch based Magic Keyboard starting with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro - and they've stuck with it ever since. That's the kind of fuck-up that gets you made an example of in college engineering courses.

But perhaps all this weirdness ends up being acceptable if the computer's performance is up to snuff, right? Yeah... about that.

Apple equipped all base model 2017 12-inch MacBooks with Intel Core m3-7Y32 mobile-class CPUs rated at 1.2 GHz (up to 3.0 GHz turbo boost), HD 615 integrated graphics and 8 GB of 1866 MHz LPDDR3 RAM. There were also options to upgrade to 16 GB of RAM, along with more powerful CPUs such as the deceptively named i5-7Y57 and i7-7Y75 which still share the same 4.5W TDP and SKU naming structure with prior Y suffix Core M series CPUs. I guess Intel was banking on people just blindly assuming "i5" and "i7" were a much bigger upsell than "m5" and "m7", which probably worked more often than not unfortunately. 

None of these CPUs are very powerful, all being from the lowest tier of Intel's mobile class Core silicon. On paper the low TDP implies this should be some reasonably power efficient silicon, ideally without turning the user-experience into a stuttering slog. Except there's one big caveat: the chip is passively cooled. That means no fans, at all. The die just dumps heat directly into a tiny little heat-spreader that barely makes contact - if any with the aluminum casing, greatly limiting the amount of surface area the computer has to cool itself.

That black metal square on the right is all the computer gets to disperse heat with.
Source: ganoninc via MacRumors

The end result is this: a computer that feels perfectly snappy doing basic tasks within the OS or browser like word processing and some media consumption, but then quickly starts to struggle the minute you start trying to stack things up. The Core m3 heats up and throttles very quickly and I was getting consistent thermals up in the range of 80 to 90 degrees Celsius with some spikes exceeding 95 degrees C, according to TG Pro. End result? I was seeing the spinning pinwheel of death A LOT.

I even observed some strange cases like trying to stream YouTube TV in Vivaldi where the CPU would throttle within a few minutes of watching, causing the frame rate to stutter repeatedly - at 720p no less. But when I tried the same thing in Safari, it seemed much more stable. Even standard YouTube at 4K60 seemed to work fine in Vivaldi as well, so this points to it being more of a browser related pathing issue for certain media formats, and in this case Safari just happens to play nicer. Regardless, it just goes to show how fickle this hardware configuration is when it comes even seemingly mundane tasks.

Even though it's not going to prove anything that I already didn't know, I still decided to benchmark this thing just to see what would happen if I asked it to try and punch above its weight. The results were about as bad as you could imagine. In a multi-core Cinebench R23 test, the MacBook only managed to complete two passes for a score of 1575 with average temps regularly hovering around 95 degrees C. 

While I didn't have any means of viewing the clocks from the start of the test to the end on this machine, it really doesn't take much to infer this chip is absolutely dying once it eclipses the 90 degree mark. I couldn't even imagine how the higher SKUs would fare with this cooling solution - or complete lack of, rather. The class of silicon should already relegate this machine to primarily light productivity use and media consumption, but it already struggles at either in any substantial mixed capacity.

Or to put it into simple engineering terms: it's pretty dogshit.

Source: iFixit

Unfortunately, in no small part to the inefficiency of the CPU, the battery life is also pretty awful. The 12-inch MacBook comes equipped with a 41.4 Wh battery which is not very big for an x86-based laptop, even one using supposedly low-power silicon. Apple estimated about 10 hours battery life for web use, which already isn't very good and honestly, I think they were still being pretty optimistic. 

I admittedly can't give an accurate assessment of this since my battery is already substantially depleted, being 9 years old and sitting at 235 cycles. System Information says that I'm currently sitting on 4141 mAh which roughly equates to 31.3 Wh. On paper that's still considered healthy, but the actual degradation is likely even worse considering the age of the cells. With light mixed use (mostly web, word processing, and some video) I'm seeing about 4 to 5 hours. That's predictably abysmal, but even 10 hours is far from spectacular for this class of machine.

So maybe you're wondering if there's a way to improve it. Well, I hinted at this in regard to Apple's own "solution" for replacing broken butterfly keyboards, but it's important to reiterate it: Apple did not design this computer to be user serviceable. The case doesn't even use Torx screws for one - instead Apple's notorious Pentalobe variety, so they really didn't want you mucking about inside this thing. Hell, it sounded like they barely wanted to themselves.

And even if you did open it up, there's not much you can do anyway. The processor, memory, and storage are all soldered to the tiny motherboard. You can replace the battery, but in order to do so you have to disassemble most of the laptop's guts and then go to war with some very stubborn adhesive. This is just hostile engineering in its most despicable form.

There was a time when a 12-inch Mac laptop wasn't embarrassing - it was only silly.

All-in-all, I can only see the 12-inch MacBook having appealed to a very narrow band of potential users: those who value looks and/or compactness above anything else. The design is gorgeous, spectacularly slim, but that came at the cost of nearly everything that makes a laptop with a full desktop OS worth using. The keyboard is atrocious, the thermals and efficiency are laughable, it struggles to perform even in the most mundane tasks, and as if it wasn't insulting enough; it only has one stupid port.

Apple was out of their minds charging $1299 as a starting point for this machine, because none of those compromises make it feel anywhere near worth it. Yet it looked the part, and that was probably the main reason Apple was able to sell any of these stupid things in any substantial quantity. It was easy to forgive yourself for buying a steaming pile of shit when it photographs this well in a coffee shop.

Old reliable.
Source: Laptop Mag

This all looks so much worse when you put it up against the pre-Retina wedge MacBook Air. Sure, it was dated; it's massive silver bezels made it look every bit like a computer from 2008. That wasn't all that appealing next to the colorful ultra-minimalist 12-inch MacBook but any self-respecting salesperson knew this: the Air was the computer you steered buyers toward if they had any indications of wanting to get actual work done.

It had more powerful U suffix Intel Core CPUs, a more effective active cooling system that - while not silent, could at least prevent its CPU from throttling under load. It also had far more ports: including two USB-A ports, MagSafe, an SD card slot, and one Thunderbolt 2 port, a slightly better 12 hour estimated battery life, and the real kicker? It could be had for roughly the same amount of money for a near-fully loaded model, if not cheaper if you spec'd down a little - but even the once $999 2017 base config would properly school the 12-inch MacBook.

Not everything about my Surface Pro 3 was great - but I still kind of miss this thing.

But there was another device that really kicked the 12-inch MacBook in the teeth in my opinion: and that was the Surface Pro. The Pro 3, 4, and 5 all came out within the life cycle of the 12-inch MacBook and at specs of roughly equivalent pricing, the Surface Pro is a machine that completely bodies Apple's wedge of hubris in terms of sheer capability.

I had a Surface Pro 3 for quite some time; having used it my last year of high school and my first year of college. It was not a perfect device either: Windows was being itself as always, the i7-4650U made it run hot and noisy, and the Type Cover was not a perfect laptop replacement (even though it arguably still felt better than the butterfly keyboard). But beyond that? It was absolutely everything the 12-inch MacBook wasn't - and then some.

It had enough power to do real shit without completely embarrassing itself like 3D CAD and gaming. You could take written notes and draw on it with the Pen. And if that somehow wasn't good enough, it still had USB-A, microSD, Mini DisplayPort, and even it's own MagSafe analogue in the form of Surface Connect. It's like Microsoft looked at Apple and said "how about we do your job, but better?" And they basically did.

The 12-inch MacBook is among one of the most notorious products to have ever come out Apple's early-Cook era and believe it or not, it actually predates the headphone jack murdering iPhone 7 by a whole year. It truly was "courage" before "courage". Form before function. The carriage before the horse. This computer and the "Trashcan" Mac Pro before it were the early warning signs that some of the dumbest trends in tech were about to kick off.

In my opinion, Apple's obsession with thinness at all costs and premature forcing of USB-C poisoned their entire lineup for years - and it all starts with the 12-inch MacBook. It was thanks to this fucking computer that the MacBook Pro was saddled with a needlessly awful keyboard, mediocre cooling, and lost all of its ports to USB-C for an entire generation. Moreover, many desktop Macs even deprecated the number of USB-A ports they offered in favor of USB-C; all while most peripheral manufacturers and OEMs effectively shrugged their shoulders and continued to prioritize developing for the standards that people were known to actually use and want.

There was a reasonable argument that the real intention behind the USB-C move was to drive the industry as a whole to more quickly adopt the arguably superior connector standard - yet I don't really buy it. This is mainly because Apple absolutely dragged their ass on bringing USB-C to devices that would actually meaningfully benefit from it - like the iPhone - and instead trudged along on Lightning for years until the EU basically forced them to implement it. It was less a move intended to be positive for the industry and more "we want to keep you buying our dongles for as long as possible".

The really funny part about all this? I still actually ended up liking this stupid little laptop. I haven't owned a laptop this small since the Surface Pro 3 and this still manages to feel like a more svelte and simultaneously complete package than that already very compact machine. Something that's this small and at least gets the basic form factor right - and does so without feeling like stereotypical netbook plastic crap is a genuine breath of fresh air.

As insane as I'm about to sound, I honestly feel like saying the 12-inch MacBook is downright bad is being unfair to it. It really isn't. Much like the "Trashcan" Mac Pro, as long as you keep your expectations in check and avoid treating it like a do everything powerhouse that can replace... well, anything with actual cooling and a usable number of ports - this is actually an extremely handy little laptop. It was just never priced like it was grounded in that reality.

And that's why I kind of love this era of Apple, because only they could make a computer that is so needlessly terrible in such a large number of ways that it ends up becoming an interesting piece of tech history. It's pure deluded hubris: the thinnest laptop in the world - and it cost nearly everything that actually makes a laptop at its price point worth using.

Should you buy a 12-inch MacBook now? Certainly not if you have any actual intentions of it being your daily driver. The MacBook Air models of roughly the same era absolutely walk all over this computer for about the same money if you find a good-conditioned example. Or, if you want the kind of computer this thing should've been from the get-go: take a look at the just released MacBook Neo. It's fun looking, runs very efficient, has a good keyboard and best of all: it's actually inexpensive.

But as an aesthetics-first relic that's occasionally useful: the 12-inch MacBook certainly delivers. There are not many computers out there quite like it. Honestly, that's probably for the better.

What's Good

• The most compact Mac laptop ever made.
• Excellent display and on-board speakers.
• A trackpad that actually feels great to use.
• They didn't have to make it look this nice - but they did.

What's Crap

• One USB-C port. Just one.
• Inefficient CPU with zero thermal headroom.
• Keyboard feels like it was designed by people who only ever typed on a touchscreen.
• Mediocre battery life considering the lack of performance.

Verdict

A laptop that pursues exceptional compactness and ludicrously good looks at the expense of, well... basically everything else.