Apple’s long, strange trip to the MacBook Neo

In late 2008, Steve Jobs hopped on the company’s quarterly phone call with analysts and, besieged by questions about Apple being threatened by low-cost PC laptops called “netbooks,” he explained how Apple approached its product decision.

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk,” he said.

It took Apple nearly 18 years to figure it out, but here we are. The announcement of the $599 MacBook Neo ($499 for education buyers!) is the low-cost laptop Mac users have been wondering about for years. But there are plenty of reasons it took this long.

Laptop dreams

In the early days of laptops, they were flat-out expensive. Apple’s PowerBooks were great, but you had to pay a premium to get a portable Mac made out of miniaturized parts. And even then, the laptops were generally slower than their desktop equivalents.

As a graduate student in 1992, I bought a PowerBook 160 to replace my Mac SE. It cost $2,400, equivalent to more than $5,000 today. I loved that thing, and I did end up using it for years in all sorts of places, even writing stories while riding BART trains through the Bay Area.

The high cost of Mac laptops meant that even lower-end models were aimed more at a professional audience, the equivalent of today’s MacBook Pros. It was only when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and drew his famous four-quarter product grid that things got really interesting.

That grid separated the Mac into four product categories, divided by audience (pro, consumer) and type (desktop, laptop). The pro desktop was the Power Mac. The consumer desktop was the iMac. The pro laptop was the PowerBook. So what was the consumer laptop?? Jobs smiled and moved right along with his presentation.

Only later, at Macworld Expo in 1999, did Jobs unveil his consumer laptop: the iBook. It cost $1,600, which was better than what I had paid for my PowerBook, at least! The original iBooks were aggressive with color–you could get them in tangerine and blueberry, and later in indigo and key lime. They were also big, weirdly shaped, and (in my opinion) completely adorable. I bought one for my mom.

But if you look at it objectively, it’s hard not to label the original iBook a failure. Not only did Apple replace it with a much more conventionally-shaped iBook just two years later, but it came only in white, ending the era of truly colorful Mac laptops forever. (Until now!) That iBook started at $1,299, a record low for a Mac laptop.

With the Intel transition, the iBook became the MacBook, and it was a perennial favorite of Mac users, especially students. But in the 2010s, it faded away, replaced in our hearts by the MacBook Air, which transformed from a pricey ultraportable into the heart of Apple’s affordable laptop line.

After a shaky few years in the mid-2010s–Apple stopped updating the Air and released a Retina MacBook that was overpriced and underpowered–the Air finally got a Retina display and, a few years later, went into overdrive with the release of the M1 MacBook Air.

In the 2020s, the Air has settled into the sweet spot in Apple’s product lineup. Starting at $999 or $1,099 for most of the modern era, it’s become the top-selling Mac.

And yet… while $999 is a far cry from what I paid for my first PowerBook, it’s also not that close to the $500 laptop Jobs said Apple couldn’t build. Which left some room down there for another laptop, if Apple could swing it.

The Neo era?

This brings us back to the MacBook Neo. It’s got colors not seen since the original iBook (including one of the original colors, indigo), but its styling is pure 2020s Apple.

What has changed since 2008, when Jobs said Apple couldn’t make a $500 laptop that wasn’t junk? So much. But in particular, Apple has become incredibly efficient with its manufacturing techniques, including being perhaps one of the companies with the most knowledge of how to shape aluminum to its will.

For me, though, the final catalyst is Apple silicon. One of the reasons the original MacBook Air and the mid-2010s Retina MacBook failed is because they were sorely underpowered. Apple’s chips were designed to work in small portable devices like iPhones, and it turned out that they translated perfectly to the Mac.

Today’s iPhone chips are so capable, they’re as fast as the M1 was a few years ago. And so Apple saw an opening: there was room for a Mac laptop to exist, powered not by an M-series chip, but by a chip designed to power an iPhone. That’s one of the reasons the MacBook Neo can exist at a price no Mac laptop has come close to before.