Should You Buy A New MacBook Now? Probably Not — 2020 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air In Limbo

I’ve nixed my plans to buy a 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro, should you?

tl;dr: If you tend to hold on to a MacBook for a long time (3 years +), you should wait as Apple phases out Intel processors and switches to its own A Series chips.

That’s because:

(1) New Macs will very likely be more power efficient* than Intel Macs. (Think: long battery life like an iPad.)

(2) As a corollary to the above, the new MacBooks could be an entirely new take on mobility and connectivity for Apple laptops.

(3) Eventually you’ll have some app compatibility issues with an Intel-based MacBook — though Apple will try to make the transition as seamless/painless as possible via emulation and other means.

(4) Good luck trying to sell your “old legacy” discontinued 2020 Intel MacBook.

In a typical scenario (before Apple made the announcement about the transition), the current Intel-based MacBooks would be viable for years.

For instance, if you buy a higher-end 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 10th Generation Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, that kind of horsepower and feature set should last you several, if not many, years.

The problem now is (post-announcement), you’re stuck on a platform destined for obsolescence.

Granted, for some, as long as their favorite/essential apps still run, they don’t care.

For me, I would always hear that clock ticking in my head. Tick, tick, tick…your hardware is slowly but surely dying.

And any issues I had (overheating, crashes, software glitches) I would always attribute — rightly or wrongly — to the obsolete Intel-based platform.

Summary:

I would suggest erring on the side of caution and, at the very least, waiting until Apple announces its first new Apple-processor MacBook. This could happen late this year or early next year.

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NOTES:

*Though this is still a big unknown, a new Apple chip-based MacBook could be as fast or faster than an Intel-based MacBook. One possibility is the Apple processor in a new MacBook will be more powerful than the processor in the 2020 iPad Pro.