Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Apple
Apple’s reputation as a premium electronics company — or at least one that can get away with overcharging for what customers are getting — survived its growth into one of the largest companies on earth and its smartphone line becoming ubiquitous. In recent years, the company has been experimenting with cheaper products, dipping into market segments where it wasn’t previously willing to fight.
Back in 2016, it began experimenting with budget phones, launching the iPhone SE. In 2017, it announced a budget tablet, dropping the price of a new standard iPad under $400 for the first time. In personal computers, where Apple’s upmarket branding was under less pressure from competitors, the company took its time, dropping the price of a new Mac Mini by $100 in 2023 and discreetly selling a 2020-spec MacBook Air through Walmart at a heavily discounted price until 2025. Overall, these product changes were minor and sort of incoherent (during the same period, for example, core iPhone pricing was creeping upward).
This week, though, Apple committed to the bit. First was an update to its budget iPhone line, replacing the 16E with a 17E at the same $599 price, despite rising memory costs and inflation. The surprise release was a new MacBook, the Neo, a $599 laptop with an iPhone processor, which is a full $500 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook Air, the price of which went up due in part to the aforementioned pressures. (The Neo could have plausibly been a $500 computer if the price of memory hadn’t multiplied since 2024). It’s small, marketed toward young buyers (and their parents) in mind — “conquer your courses,” “perfect for learning,” “updating after-school schedules,” and so on — and comes in new colors, including pink and, for some reason, bile green.
Another aspect of Apple’s move down-market has been hidden in plain sight in the form of fairly steady, round price points ($999 iPhones and MacBooks, etc.) maintained through periods of inflation, effectively lowering most of its prices since 2020 while keeping decent profit margins. (As a result, the last few generations of MacBook Air, for example, have been widely reviewed as good values.) Now, it’s starting to look like Apple is willing to sacrifice some of those margins, and perhaps some extra capability, to compete with cheaper Windows computers and Chromebooks, which have been the go-to need-a-laptop-for-school machines for the last five years but which are each sort of dying, too: Windows usage is in free fall, and Google doesn’t seem to know what to do with laptops at all.
Anyway, whatever Apple’s strategy is here, you can now get a MacBook for $600 but with a fairly long list of serious compromises. After spending some time looking at the company’s increasingly confusing lineup — as Wired notes, Apple is now selling a whole new laptop for substantially less than a base Apple Watch Ultra — you might actually decide you’re better off with … an iPad? To put my old gadget-blogger hat back on: This sort of disorienting catalogue has been a standard experience outside of the Apple ecosystem for decades, whether you were buying an alphanumerically named Sony MP3 player or an LG smartphone. Now you can enjoy a similar experience at the Apple Store, too.
