The irony of the launch sequence of the Apple Macbook Neo is one that will be way more significant looking retrospectively in a couple of years. In a non typical apple fashion a new product has been launched outside the grand keynote ceremonies, instead a 2 minutes marketing video sufficed, it showed a dexterous hand molding a computer almost like clay. And we all got into a frenzy, not for the device itself and it's technical prowess, but for the price tag and the relative affordability for an Apple Standard executed hardware. It is a unibody aluminium case, has a butterfly keyboard, runs MacOS and all the regular apps, just like the rest of the Macbook lineup. The MacBook Neo did what the iPhone SE could not: make a low budget Apple device exciting while giving its bang for a buck, 599 in fact.

The brand new Macbook Neo

A week later another headline almost failed to make the news as the company discontinued its Mac Pro line up entirely. The recent Mac Studio success is not foreign to this cessation but the trend is deeper than it seems and it shows in my opinion an executive take at where Apple should position itself in the decades old stiff personal computer feud: a reformed challenger that decided to reenter the competition for the mass appeal, and Windows laptop makers have taken notice. Soon after the announcement...

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The Macbook Studio (left) and the Mac Pro (right)

An haute trahison for the Apple Boy Elite

The prestige-driven, exclusive and almost alterity-deriding Apple fan Boy got accustomed to the banality of Apple logo flanked devices since the democratization of the iPod and then the iPhone and the iPad. These devices put in the hands of billions more than a good product, it gave them a glimpse of what Apple has always been about: a good design is about how the product works. But that is only half of the company's manifesto even though it's the most cherished by designers. The other half, buried in decades of costly r&d and let's be honest the search for profit, is a guiding principle that can finally resurge now that the complexities of making computers have been tamed and costs are stabilised by the magic of the M series chip: the quest to put in the hands of the most the best and simplest devices. And the MacBook Neo is exactly that.

Apple in popularity

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Steve Jobs

When I managed to run a heavy 10 minutes Final Cut project on my 2013 Macbook Air I gained another level of respect for Macbooks. Even though the laptop almost turned into a toaster and that I certainly would be better using a Macbook Pro, I managed to finish the editing and deliver the project to my client. That experience of pushing the boundaries of what is possible on an entry level computer is what millions of first time user are going to experience. They are going to decorrelate shiny specifications with actual performance, and by the grace of a unified, coherent ecosystem, they will definitely get hooked.

Universal design at reach

Formalised by Ronald Mace, universal design consists in designing a product so it is usable by the widest possible range of people, regardless of ability or disability, age, language or culture or experience level. That approach has always been at the core of Apple design and it it now available to almost everybody. The design is finally universal.

So the verdict is clear, rather than flaunt the Macbook Neo as a renouncement to its elite image, I rather see a welcoming lowering of the ticket d'entrée to the Apple ecosystem.

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