I’ve always been a generation or two behind on the general consumer electronics curve. My family didn’t get a home PC until late into the ’90s. I had a desktop in college instead of a laptop because it was cheaper. My first cellphone was pay-as-you go and my first smartphone wasn’t until 2012. Cutting-edge electronics, especially of the high-end variety, just have never been a part of my life. I spend every day of my life writing online and my laptop is a 10-year-old Asus Zenbook that’s missing three keyboard keys. All of which is to say that the new Apple Macbook Neo is the budget Apple laptop I’ve been waiting for.
Revealed earlier today, it’s a 13-inch display device (liquid retina) that runs on old iPhone chips (2024 A18 Pro mobile) and starts at $600. It only has 8GB of un-upgradable RAM but it comes in various muted metallic pastel colors, including a piss yellow that feels like it would have been right at home on an early 2000s gaming handheld. All of which is to say that I kind of love it. I’ve never owned an Apple device before and I have no desire to become trapped in that walled garden, but a sleek, fun, functional low-end laptop might be worth deprograming my Windows-pilled brain for.
I’ve been shopping for a new laptop recently (see the part above about the Frankenstein Zenbook). I already have a cheap Chromebook, but while that would be the smart option for my needs I want something that can function independently of the web. As a stingy dad whose idea of luxury is pumping the thermostat to 67 in the middle of a winter polar vortex, I’m committed to staying in the low end of the laptop range. And let me tell you, the options mostly suck!
Great battery life and 16GB of RAM comes at the expense of shoddy screen displays and build quality. Copilot bullshit is being clumsily shoehorned into everything. Even the good value laptops, like a Dell Plus, look somewhere between boring and ugly. Plus I’m obsessed with small laptops. I used to steal my friend’s Toshiba Mini in college and loved it. I want something light and compact, but anything below 14 inches these days comes at a premium.
Plus, Windows is a godawful mess. I’m losing my will to navigate ever-increasing layers of OS enshittification as Microsoft chases AI hyperscaler revenue. It breaks. It doesn’t do cool stuff. It’s a resource hog. It’s strangling what’s left of Xbox ahead of the next console hardware launch. I should probably build an air-gapped Linux machine and live out the rest of my days on a farm, but in the meantime I’ll settle for the first MacBook that’s cheaper than a PS5 Pro, especially since the rest of the MacBook Airs and Pros just got memory-crunch-fueled price hikes.