The MacBook Neo is worse. We love it.
The MacBook Neo is really something, isn't it? Novelty is a hell of a drug, but I also think there's something to specific products that, despite them clearly not being the best technical option available, still have a draw for some reason. Apple's actually had two examples of this in the past six months alone.
On paper, the iPhone Air is absolutely not the best iPhone that came out last year. The iPhone 17 Pro is better in every spec, and the iPhone 17 is better and cheaper. While reports seem to be that the Air is not selling as much as those other two phones, it's certainly creating die hard fans as well. They understand the trade-offs and they still want this phone.
And now I think we're seeing something similar with the MacBook Neo. While I do think that the honeymoon period with this device will start to wear thin over time as the realities of using a budget computer start to sink in amongst an audience that's used to using premium machines, I still think there's something special here. I have it; I already own an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. I have a computer that I've described as having effectively unlimited power and is just a perfect device for me in almost every way. But I gotta be honest, I am using the MacBook Neo when I'm not at my desk because I just like using it.
It has a smaller screen, it's noticeably slower, and I'm having to remember to add all of these little things that I customized about my system on the MacBook Pro and get them on here so things work as I expect. So it's definitely more work I'm going through to make this happen, and all to use a machine that's not as good, technically. And yet I keep turning to it.
So I think there's something that some products have that is special and just taps into something that people really love. And I think the MacBook Neo has that, as does the iPhone Air that came out a few months ago.
Both of these devices point to something I keep coming back to lately: the computers in our lives right now (including smartphones) are kind of better than they need to be. We'd all be totally fine with less. Lots of us love to pixel-peep a photo comparison between the latest iPhone and the latest Samsung or whatever, searching for whichever one is 2% better in any given situation, then using the winner to validate their purchasing decision. But then an iPhone Air comes out with a single, worse camera, suddenly plenty of people are saying, "you know, I really only need the one camera, right?"
Similarly, with Macs in the Apple Silicon era, we've loved as Apple fans to share bar charts showing how fast Apple Silicon is and how terrible SSD speeds are on other devices and all this stuff. And the MacBook Neo does all the bad things that we said about those other computers, but we love it.
So there's something there where we set the bar super high for what we demand from these computers that we buy. And then sometimes we'll get a device that's not as technically powerful, and we still love it, and we still are able to do what we want on it. And I just think that's something that we should ruminate on, the question of how much power we actually need when we get a computer, whether it's a computer that sits on our desk, goes in our backpack, or lives in our pocket.
None of this is meant to suggest that wanting more is somehow wrong. If you enjoy having a fast, high-quality computer, that's completely valid. What you need and what you want don't have to be the same thing, and there's nothing wrong with wanting nice things.
