Tiering products does not mean feature gating
Apple has a long habit of using product tiers not to serve different kinds of users, but to withhold features as an upgrade incentive. The classics are well-documented: you get the action button on the Pro, you get the better display on the Pro, you get the faster chip on the Pro. Not because those features are harder to engineer at scale, but because keeping them scarce makes the premium tier feel worth the price.
This is a different thing to having a genuine product hierarchy. A real hierarchy is one where the compromises in cheaper products reflect real engineering constraints (battery life for thinness, performance for price) rather than artificial locks. The iPhone has recently gotten closer to this. The Mac and iPad lineups have not.
The current state of things
MacBook: legacy is hanging over the lineup
To understand why the MacBook lineup is confusing, you have to go back to the mid-2010s. In 2015, Apple had a clean enough story: the MacBook Air was the thin-and-light for people who valued portability above all else, and the MacBook Pro was the workhorse for people who needed the power. There was a brief experiment with a 12-inch fanless MacBook in the middle, which was quietly killed off in 2019.
What followed was a decade of drift. The Air got faster and more capable until it stopped being a clear trade-off and became just a cheaper Pro. The Pro expanded to cover everything from a relatively modest 14-inch M5 base model at £1,699 all the way to an M5 Max configuration at around £3,899: two very different computers sharing a name. And then in March 2026, Apple launched the MacBook Neo at £599, powered by an A18 Pro iPhone chip with 8GB of fixed RAM and an sRGB display, sitting £500 below the Air and set to compete with Chromebooks.
The result is a lineup where the names no longer tell you what you’re getting. The Air is not meaningfully airy anymore. The Pro covers too wide a range to mean anything specific. And the Neo, to its credit, is at least honest about its compromises as it is a cut-down device and it is priced like one and is finally a move in the right direction.
The rumoured MacBook Ultra is supposed to be the next chapter: a major redesign with an OLED touchscreen, Dynamic Island, M6 Pro and M6 Max chips on TSMC’s 2nm process, and cellular connectivity, expected sometime in early 2027 (after a RAM shortage pushed it back). But here is the problem. If Apple treats the Ultra as just another product bolted on at the top, it will make the confusion worse rather than better. The Pro line will still span £2,200 of price range with the same name. The Air will still be stranded in the middle without a clear identity. The Neo will sit at the bottom doing its own thing. And now there will be a fourth tier above all of it.
The Ultra moment should be, and still could be, a full lineup reset. New designs across all models, clean trade-offs, honest naming. Apple has the opportunity to use the Ultra’s new display technology and chassis as the occasion to rethink what each MacBook is actually for, rather than letting it land as another layer of historical sediment on top of a lineup that already has too much of it.
iPad: the running joke
The iPad lineup manages to pack more structural absurdity into four products than most companies manage across an entire catalogue.
- iPad Pro: the thinnest, the lightest, the best display, the most powerful chip. The M4 with up to 16GB RAM, tandem OLED, 120Hz. The best iPad in every dimension simultaneously.
- iPad Air: updated March 2026 with the M4 chip and 12GB RAM at £599 for the 11-inch. Not the thinnest. Not the best display. Somewhere in the middle on performance.
- iPad (11th gen): A16 chip, 6GB RAM, 60Hz LCD, at £349.
- iPad mini: A17 Pro, 8GB RAM, and with the 2026 update, an OLED display at 120Hz for £499.
The Pro is simultaneously the thinnest, lightest, and most powerful iPad. Apple has designed a product with nothing to trade against anything cheaper except the price tag itself. If you want a thinner iPad, you buy the most expensive one. If you want the best screen, same. If you want the most performance, same again. There is no engineering tension in the Pro as it just wins at everything, which is a strange thing to call a design philosophy.
The Air is the product this creates. Stranded. It has near-Pro internals but not the Pro’s display, not the Pro’s thinness, and not a price that makes it an obvious entry point. It exists mainly because the Pro is inexplicably thin rather than because anyone sat down and designed a genuine middle tier. The iPad mini, meanwhile, just got an OLED screen at 120Hz, which makes the base iPad’s 60Hz LCD look even more difficult to justify at £349.
iPhone: the one that has actually improved
The iPhone lineup is worth examining not because it’s perfect, but because it shows that Apple can get this right when it tries.
The iPhone 17 family launched in September 2025 with genuinely distinct identities. The Pro models earned their name: the triple-lens camera system, up to 8x optical zoom, vapour chamber cooling to sustain the A19 Pro under load. This is meaningfully different from what you get on the base model, not just marginally better. The base iPhone 17 at £799 is a genuinely great device in its own right: 120Hz ProMotion, a larger 6.3-inch display, good battery life. But there are no compromises on the base model if you don’t need the Pro features. Features that used to be Pro-only are now the baseline, and the Pro has moved on to justify itself on its own terms.
The iPhone Air at £999 is a real Air: 5.64mm thick, one rear camera, mono speaker, shorter battery life. The thinness is real and so are the trade-offs. The iPhone 17e at £599 gets you into the ecosystem with current hardware, A19 chip, MagSafe, 256GB storage, rather than recycled parts from two years ago.
Each product has a story. The trade-offs are honest. That structure should come to the Mac and iPad.
Rethinking the Mac lineup
Given all of the above, here is what a clean MacBook lineup could look like, and what the Ultra moment makes possible if Apple chooses to use it properly:
| Model | Goal | Compromises | Chips |
|---|---|---|---|
| MacBook | The honest everyday starting point. Good screen with high refresh rate, 14 or 16-inch, up to 24GB RAM | The default — no artificial gates | Base M chips |
| MacBook Neo | The entry-level device, upfront about its compromises | A-series chip, fixed 8GB RAM, sRGB display | A-series (A18 Pro currently) |
| MacBook Air | A genuinely thin MacBook | Fanless thermal ceiling, real sustained performance trade-off | Base M chips |
| MacBook Pro | The workstation | Price, in exchange for sustained performance | M Pro and M Max chips only, 32GB and above |
The Pro and Max chips, and RAM configurations above 32GB, should only live in the Pro. That is what makes it a Pro. The base MacBook covers everyone who wants a great everyday machine without paying workstation prices, and the Air covers people for whom thinness and weight are the primary constraint. The Neo is honest about what it is.
There is an argument that one spec should be off the table for upselling until you reach the Neo, and that spec is the screen. Unlike RAM or chip performance, a good display is not a professional need — it is just a better experience for everyone. Gating it behind the Pro price tag is not segmentation, it is artificial scarcity applied to the thing everyone looks at all day.
As for the Ultra: rather than a new product tier bolted on above the Pro, the better version of this is that the Ultra’s new technology (the OLED display, the redesigned chassis, the new silicon) becomes the occasion for a refresh across the whole lineup. Every MacBook gets a design update. The features cascade appropriately rather than being locked to a single flagship. This is probably harder to execute now than it would have been if Apple had planned it that way from the start, but it is still possible, and it would result in a lineup that actually makes sense.
It is worth keeping a mini-LED option available for people who are concerned about OLED burn-in or who prioritise battery life from a higher-capacity panel.
Rethinking the iPad lineup
Setting aside the iPad-as-laptop-replacement case, which is real but probably covers a minority of buyers, most people use iPads for media consumption. Reading, light creative work, and occasionally as a second screen. The lineup should be designed around that, with honest trade-offs at each tier.
| Model | Goal | Compromises |
|---|---|---|
| iPad | The best media consumption device: tandem OLED, 120Hz, great screen, real battery life from a thicker chassis | Not tailored for creation; basic, if any, Pencil support but not Pencil Pro |
| iPad Neo | A cut-down iPad for the student | Worse screen in exchange; thinness not a priority |
| iPad Air | Thinner than the Pro and base iPad, for people who want a great screen without needing performance | Performance and battery headroom traded for thinness |
| iPad Pro | Thicker than the Air, closer to the base’s size. The battery king: best performance, built for 3D, music production, serious creative work | Price in exchange for performance |
The Pro being thicker than the Air is the key structural argument. It gives Apple something to trade. The Air becomes genuinely thin at a real cost. The base iPad becomes the best screen-for-money device rather than a lesser version of everything above it.
On screen sizes: the 2026 iPad mini getting an OLED screen at 120Hz is actually an argument for offering size options within tiers rather than keeping the mini as its own separate line. A 7-inch and 11-inch iPad, a 7-inch and 11-inch iPad Air, a 7-inch, 11-inch, and 13-inch iPad Pro. More SKUs, but the consumer chooses form factor and capability independently, which is how it should work.
Conclusion
The iPhone 17 lineup is the proof of concept. The Pro models are genuinely pro — the camera system, the thermal management, the sustained performance under load justify the price in ways that are visible and tangible. The base model is a great device rather than a deliberately hobbled one. The Air and the 17e have trade-offs that are upfront and honest, and Apple is visibly refining them with each generation.
The MacBook Neo and the iPhone 17e using similar naming logic shows that Apple is at least thinking about explicit segmentation. But the naming is the easy part. The harder part is engineering the trade-offs honestly across the whole lineup rather than just relabelling the same artificial gates.
And that is where the MacBook Ultra becomes a problem rather than a solution. If it lands as another product on top of a Pro line that already spans £2,200 and an Air that has been stranded without a clear identity for years, it makes the confusion worse rather than better. There will be more tiers, more overlap, more questions about what you’re actually paying for.
The Ultra moment should be a lineup reset. Apple still has the chance to use it as one.