If you’re as old as I am, you might remember the early-2000s demands for Apple to make a netbook, which was a super-cheap lightweight laptop that cost pennies compared to a normal PC.
Steve Jobs wasn’t impressed, deriding them as “cheap laptops”; he also said that Apple simply didn’t know how to make a $500 computer that was not “a piece of junk”. So Apple made the MacBook Air and then the iPad instead.
Today, though, Apple launched the MacBook Neo — and it’s definitely a cheap laptop. But crucially, while it’s a $500 computer (if you can get the educational discount; it’s a $599 computer for the rest of us) it’s not a piece of junk.
You’re going to see them everywhere.
A cheap Apple laptop is an excellent thing
Jobs was absolutely right when he said it wasn’t possible for Apple to make a cheap laptop that wasn’t a piece of junk, because when he said, Apple was two years away from launching its first chip, and the true Apple Silicon revolution was over a decade away.
But the Apple A18 Pro processor in the new MacBook Neo is pretty damn speedy, and perfectly powerful for everyday computing tasks such as fighting people on the internet, watching junk, and endless online retail therapy to avoid the world’s troubles. And for home and student users, that covers 99% of usage.
I wouldn’t buy one for me, because the spec isn’t good enough for heavy Logic Pro use; I’ve got an M1 Max MacBook Pro for that.
But I’d buy one for my kids, and there are lots of parents who’ll be thinking the same. Apple’s just cut the cost of having an Apple laptop in half.
As much as I’m having fun with the idea of an Apple netbook, the Neo clearly is nothing like a netbook, because netbooks were crap: I tried loads of them and owned one or two, and while they were fine for tapping out words on a train, I couldn’t wait to dump them when I got home so I could use an iBook, which felt like a supercomputer by comparison. A full-sized computer was a lot nicer to type on, too.
The Neo is clearly the successor to the OG MacBook, which Apple first launched in 2015. That was Intel-powered, not Apple-powered, and the tech of the day meant it wasn’t as cheap as the Neo: the first generation was more expensive than this week’s new M55 MacBook Air.
The MacBook got cheaper, but it was still in the high three figures: in 2019 UK buyers were paying £799 (the weak dollar at the time meant US buyers were paying more: $1,299).
Apple was never going to make a netbook or a low-end Chromebook competitor. What it’s done instead is taken the iPhone model and the Apple Watch model and made a MacBook SE, a device that isn’t as good as the more expensive models but that’s good enough for budget buyers.
And it’s using that not just to sell more Macs, which of course it will. It’s also using it as a Trojan horse for its services division, which really wants to sell you subs to Apple Music, Apple TV, the Creator Studio and more.
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