Can Apple de-fingerprint the midnight MacBook Air, or will space black replace it?

Zac Hall | Nov 1 2023 - 9:37 am PT

If you’ve bought a midnight-colored MacBook Air, the smudge factor is already baked in. If the fingerprint-magnet color sticks around, though, I wonder if Apple could apply the same anodization seal technique to midnight that it’s using with space black.

This story is supported by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates five different applications on a single Apple-only platform, allowing businesses and schools to easily and automatically deploy, manage, and protect all their Apple devices. Over 38,000 organizations leverage Mosyle solutions to automate the deployment, management, and security of millions of Apple devices daily. Request a FREE account today and discover how you can put your Apple fleet on auto-pilot at a price point that is hard to believe.

My first guess is yes, but that it might be a technique and color it saves for premium-priced notebooks.

Apple is already doing this with the M3 MacBook Pro: $1600 gets you space gray, and $2000 gets you space black. The $400 difference nets you much more than a darker finish, but the stealthier color is being used for market segmentation to start.

If the anodization seal technique proves successful, Apple certainly should apply it to midnight-colored notebooks — but that brings up another question. Should midnight even exist now that we have space black?

Top comment by Bill Kroll

Liked by 4 people

I actually prefer the Midnight to the Space Black due to its uniqueness and color shifting in different lighting. The midnight color was derived from volcanic basalt. That said, it would be nice for it to get similar fingerprint resistance in the future. The fingerprints I do get don’t bother me terribly, but like the white seats in my car, it’s a reminder to actually clean the thing on occasion.

View all comments

There will be people who prefer the hint of blue in midnight notebooks, but there are also people who opt for midnight only in the absence of black.

Now that Apple has shown it can do black aluminum in something larger than an iPhone 7, I hope we see it in more places. A space black iPad Pro sounds pretty sweet.

The fact that the $1600 MacBook Pro doesn’t come in space black yet, however, suggests we won’t see a space black MacBook Air anytime soon.

If that’s the case, Apple should definitely try to improve the midnight finish with its anodization seal technique. Smudgy aluminum is nothing compared to that whole defective keyboard saga. Still, it’d be a nice improvement to midnight MacBook Airs.