If you’re as old as I am, you might remember the early 2000s clamoring for Apple to make a netbook, which was a super-cheap lightweight laptop that cost pennies compared to a normal PC.
Steve Jobs was not impressed and derided 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 junk.” So Apple made the MacBook Air and then the iPad instead.
Today, however, Apple launched the MacBook Neo – and it’s certainly a cheap laptop. But crucially, while it’s a $500 computer (if you can get the education discount; it’s a $599 computer for the rest of us), it’s no junk.
You will see them everywhere.
A cheap Apple laptop is an excellent thing
Jobs was absolutely right when he said that it was not possible for Apple to make a cheap, non-junk laptop, because when he said that, 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 fast and perfect for everyday computing tasks like battling people on the internet, watching junk and endless online retail therapy to avoid the world’s problems. And for home users and students, it covers 99% of use.
I wouldn’t buy one for myself because the spec isn’t good enough for heavy Logic Pro use; I have an M1 Max MacBook Pro for it.
But I would buy one for my kids and there are many parents who will think the same. Apple has just cut the cost of owning an Apple laptop in half.
As much as I have fun with the idea of an Apple netbook, the Neo is clearly nothing like a netbook, because netbooks were crap: I tried a bunch of them and owned one or two, and while they were fine for typing 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 size computer was also much nicer to type on.
The Neo is clearly the successor to the OG MacBook, which Apple first launched in 2015. It was Intel-powered, not Apple-powered, and today’s technology 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 paid £799 (the weak dollar at the time meant US buyers paid more: $1,299).
Apple would never make a netbook or a low-cost Chromebook competitor. What it has 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 is good enough for budget buyers.
And it’s not just using that to sell more Macs, which of course it wants to. It also uses it as a Trojan horse for its service department, which really wants to sell you subs for Apple Music, Apple TV, Creator Studio and more.
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