If you’re as old as I am, you may remember the lawsuits in the early 2000s for Apple to make a netbook, which was a super-cheap, lightweight laptop that cost pennies compared to a regular PC.
Steve Jobs was unimpressed and mocked them as “cheap laptops”; He also said that Apple simply didn’t know how to make a $500 computer that wasn’t “a piece of crap.” So Apple made the MacBook Air and then the iPad.
However, today Apple launched the MacBook Neo, and it is definitely a cheap laptop. But the most important thing is that 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 are going to see them everywhere.
A cheap Apple laptop is a great 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 it, Apple was two years away from releasing its first chip, and the real Apple Silicon revolution was more than a decade away.
But the Apple A18 Pro processor in the new MacBook Neo is plenty fast and perfectly powerful for everyday computing tasks, like fighting with people on the Internet, binge-watching, and endless online shopping therapy to avoid the world’s problems. And for home users and students, that covers 99% of usage.
I wouldn’t buy one for myself, because the specs aren’t good enough for heavy Logic Pro use; I have a MacBook Pro M1 Max for that.
But I would buy one for my children and there are many parents who will think the same. Apple just cut the cost of owning an Apple laptop in half.
As much as I am amused by the idea of an Apple netbook, the Neo is clearly nothing like a netbook, because netbooks were shit: I tried a lot and owned one or two, and while they were fine for writing words on a train, I couldn’t wait to get rid of them when I got home so I could use an iBook, which looked like a supercomputer by comparison. It was also much more pleasant to type on a full-size computer.
The Neo is clearly the successor to the OG MacBook, which Apple first launched in 2015. It was powered by Intel, not Apple, and the technology of the time 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 became cheaper, but it was still in the high three figures: in 2019, UK buyers paid £799 (the weak dollar at the time meant US buyers paid more: $1,299).
Apple was never going to make a netbook or a low-end Chromebook competitor. Instead, what it did was take the iPhone model and the Apple Watch model and create a MacBook SE, a device that’s not as good as the more expensive models but is good enough for buyers on a budget.
And it’s using that not only 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 subscribers to Apple Music, Apple TV, Creator Studio, and more.
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