Analyst hat comes off, reviewer hat goes on

Jason Snell thought my MacBook Neo review missed the point of the product:

But this entire conversation misses the most important thing about the MacBook Neo: It is sold in every Apple Store, on Apple’s website, and in every Apple sales channel. Most people won’t think to cruise for a refurbished Air—they will just go down to their local store, or pop onto Amazon, and shop for a computer. That’s why the MacBook Neo is important. It’s available to everyone, everywhere, and Apple will stand behind it as a new product.

Jason’s reaction to my review got me thinking about the multiple hats that many of us in the Apple punditry wear. We’re both analysts and reviewers, and in my opinion, those are two different roles with different priorities, although I recognize that the line is blurred differently for different people.

As an analyst, I’m interested in helping people understand Apple as a company, why they make the decisions they do, and what that could mean for the future of their products. This is not the same thing as being a reviewer, which is all about giving consumers useful information when they’re considering whether they want to buy a product. When I wear my analyst hat, I’m thinking about profit margins, supply chains, and product segmentation, but when I put my reviewer hat on, I’m really just thinking about customer value.

As a simple example from recent years, with my analyst hat on, I could completely understand why Apple was shipping MacBooks in the premium space with less RAM than the competition. However, with my reviewer hat on, I emphatically did not like that because I felt it wasn’t giving a good enough experience to people who spent over a thousand dollars on a laptop.

There is certainly room to disagree here, but for me, I don't like to mix the two if I can help it. I try to focus on what consumer need this product solves, and how it compares to the alternatives potential buyers have. I don't put a number on my reviews, nor do I come out and say explicitly whether you should buy a product or not. I want to share my opinion, while giving you the context you need to know whether this is the right product for you. As Jason said, Apple is selling this in Apple stores, it's taking over their website, and it's all over TikTok…Apple doesn't need my help letting people know this is a product they might want to get.

Put another way, no one is going to learn what the MacBook Neo is from my review. My job as an Apple expert who has used more computers in his life than most people in the world, is to tell them what life is like with this computer, and how it compares to other options they might consider.

Looking back at my review, I really do stand by everything I said. I spent the first half talking about the build quality, construction, and general quality of other components, which I was almost entirely positive about. I spent the second half talking about the performance, which I likened to that of an M1 Mac from 2020. That’s not the end of the world, and as pretty much every reviewer has stated, that is sufficient performance to do basically everything you could want to do on a Mac, if you’re willing to wait a little longer than you would on a high-end device.

The reason I felt it was worth bringing up purchasing other devices that might be a couple years old is twofold. First, this is not a product that’s interesting because of its cutting-edge tech, it’s a product that’s interesting because of its price. Its affordability compared to other Macs is central its appeal. Second, and related, this product exists to sell Macs to people who have never bought a Mac before, either because they didn’t want to or couldn’t spend the money it took to buy a new Apple computer.

My suggestion is that people who are looking for a budget Mac are very likely to shop around to find the best deal, and they may not have as stringent rules as some of us do about always having to buy new direct from the source. When I went on Amazon just now and searched for the word “MacBook,” I saw a whole host of options, from current-generation models to older generations, and they’re all next to each other, side by side. So if you’re in the $700-ish price range on Amazon, you’re going to be presented with a MacBook Neo, an M2 MacBook Air, and an M1 Pro MacBook Pro. They're all presented equally on Amazon, so which one do you choose?

From that perspective, I think the M2 Air is going to give you the best bang for your buck for the most people. It's thinner than the Neo, has a better screen, better keyboard, better trackpad, better I/O, better speakers, and better performance, so if they're the same price, hell yeah I think there are plenty of people who would be happier with this.

I can obviously see that the MacBook Neo has something special about it, as people who have absolutely no strict need for it (like me), are drawn to it. I also understand that buying a new computer, even if it may be technically inferior in some ways to a several-years-old computer, can feel better. I think these things will make the MacBook Neo a successful product, and according to Tim Cook, it already has been.

If you’re coming to my review, I really want you to question whether the Neo is the best way for you to spend $700, or whether something else would make you happier. I'm writing this from a MacBook Neo right now, so I get it, sometimes the heart wants what it wants, but I'm using this because it's fun, not because it was the best $700 computer I could have gotten.

I understand the strategy here from Apple’s perspective, and I think that part of the market segmentation that they’re trying to do is to make the Neo good enough to use, but not good enough to steal people away from spending more to get a MacBook Air. From Apple's perspective, they're trying to segment their product line so that the Neo isn't good enough to steal people away from the more expensive MacBook Air. They want the Neo to get more people in the door, but they certainly don't want to turn themselves into a budget computer company. My analyst hat and my reviewer hat understand things differently, and if my review makes someone who was going to get the Neo opt to browse for better deals on more capable machines, I think I've done my job.

Also, this has nothing to do with Apple, but just a congrats to Jason for being on Jeopardy last week! That's a serious bucket list thing to do, and it was great to see him on there. It was also very fun to tell my wife that we needed to watch a specific episode because, "I know one of the contestants!"