The 2018 MacBook Air is the iPhone X’s ASP strategy all over again

This. "Then" is also capitalized. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this.

Not sure I agree that the Macbook is "an inferior machine at a higher price". At 12", it is the only <13" offering currently.

So I did a search in the article for the word "inflation" and found no hits, but I think it's something that the tech world is going to have to start getting used to after decades in the steep part of a S-curve that let it defy the normal. In most of the developed world at least inflation is generally quite low, but it's not zero (nor is zero or worse deflation a healthy sign). For electronics there has been a long time where constant improvements in process technology, efficiency, mass manufacturing tech, and just plain ever larger scales as it went global, meant that every year or two allowed more to be done cheaper.

But at this point that's heavily played out. Progress is certainly not "done" by any means, and the slowdown is uneven (GPUs still scale more easily for example), but it's not exponential or essentially "free" anymore either. Bumping into harder physics means process shrinks keep getting harder and vastly more expensive for less gains, the low hanging frequency improvements and IPC has been picked, a lot of the trivial vectorization and parallelism done, hyper cheap mass labor utilized, the easy parts of the global market gobbled up, etc. There are also softer issues like inequality to deal with and in turn a wider spread in prices people might pay.

So tech companies are going to face a more "normal" world, where no a device from a year ago or two years ago or even 5 or more years ago isn't necessarily "obsolete". That means they'll need to figure out how to start raising prices over time just to keep pace with inflation let alone secure more growth when expanding marketshare or cutting costs is ever harder. But the public has been conditioned for a very long time to expect prices to always stay the "same" (which really means it's falling in real terms over time) or outright drops on the sticker price. Figuring out how to navigate that to a new normal without promoting undue backlash is something everyone will need to grapple with. One approach that Apple may be going for is to just take some pages from mature areas like cars, where there is a huge premium for "brand new", and large percentages of the population are fine getting used or "last year's that didn't sell" (let alone an "old model but newly manufactured" which isn't really a thing with cars) and will never buy brand new their entire lives. But "old" models still get support for a long time and to the basic job fine.

Other strategies of course include trying to shift more into ongoing services revenue, platform monetization (be it a cut of software sales or ads), premium support offerings, etc. Different players will try different mixes. But nobody will be able to avoid it anymore then other industries, at least not unless some other huge productivity shift (automation related perhaps) happens.

What do you gain with picking a 12-inch display over a 13.3-inch display?

Is this a trick question? If you are in the market for a smaller than 13” computer then that’s that.