A timely reminder of why I believe firing Scott Forstall was ultimately the right decision at the time.
Perhaps my favorite Steve Jobs keynote moment was one of his last, at the iPad 2 introduction in March 2011. The last demo of the day, just before Jobs introduced the idea that Apple existed at the…
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I of course can’t prove a hypothetical (what if Scott Forstall had stayed on), but I don’t dislike the current state of Apple, and it’s easy to envision a hundred other ways Apple could have made the wrong call (eg: following random Macrumour suggestions for example) and gone down the wrong path via financially ruinous decisions.
Tim Cook is the steady hand Apple needs in a time of growing unrest and uncertainty, and as I grow older myself, I find myself appreciating the work that he has done.
Completely agree, and it’s part of the reason why I think John Ternus will also make a great CEO in a completely different way.
Reading people‘s impressions of his presentation after the event, especially John Gruber, you get the impression that he absolutely understands that original culture of Apple.
He gets what Steve meant by saying “We Can’t ship junk”.
Feel however you want to about the products introduced this week, but one thing they are not is junk.
The MacBook Neo is not junk.
The iPhone 17e is not junk.
The base iPad, even though it wasn’t updated this week, is still not junk.
And Ternus knows it, he gets it.
From John Gruber:
“$599. Not a piece of junk.
That’s not a marketing slogan from Apple for the new MacBook Neo . But it could be.”
“I’m writing this from Apple’s hands-on “experience” in New York, amongst what I’d estimate as a few hundred members of the media. It’s a pretty big event, and a very big space inside some sort of empty warehouse on the western edge of Chelsea. Before playing the four-minute Neo introduction video (which you should watch —
it’s embedded in Apple’s Newsroom post), John Ternus took the stage to address the audience. He emphasized that the Mac user base continues to grow, because “nearly half of Mac buyers are new to the platform”. Ternus didn’t say the following aloud, but Apple clearly knows what has kept a
lot of would-be switchers from switching, and it’s the price. The Mac Mini is great, but normal people only buy laptops, and aside from the aforementioned dabbling with the five-year-old M1 MacBook Air, Apple just hasn’t ventured under $999. “
We don’t ship junk,” Steve Jobs said back in 2007. It’s not that Apple never noticed the demand for laptops in the $500–700 range. It’s that they didn’t see how to make one that wasn’t junk.
Now they have. And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like
this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the keyboard sucks, and the trackpad sucks. It’s a thick, heavy, plasticky piece of junk. I didn’t put my nose to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it smells bad.
The MacBook Neo looks and feels every bit like a MacBook. Solid aluminum. Good keyboard (no backlighting, but supposedly the same mechanism as in other post-2019 MacBooks — felt great in my quick testing). Good trackpad (no
Force Touch — it actually physically clicks, but you can click anywhere, not just the bottom). Good bright display (500 nits max, same as the MacBook Air). Surprisingly good speakers, in a new side-firing configuration. Without even turning either laptop on, you can just see and feel that the MacBook Neo is a vastly superior device.
And when you do turn them on, you see the vast difference in display quality and hear the vast difference in speaker quality. And you get MacOS, not Windows, which, even with Tahoe, remains the quintessential glass of ice water in hell for the computer industry.
I came into today’s
event experience expecting a starting price of $799 for the Neo — $300 less than the new $1,099 price for the base M5 MacBook Air (which, in defense of that price, starts with 512 GB storage). $599 is a f**king statement. Apple is coming after this market. I think they’re going to sell a zillion of these things, and “almost half” of new Mac buyers being new to the platform is going to become “more than half”. The MacBook Neo is not a footnote or hobby, or a pricing stunt to get people in the door before upselling them to a MacBook Air. It’s the first major new Mac aimed at the consumer market in the Apple Silicon era. It’s meant to make a dent — perhaps a minuscule
dent in the universe, but a big dent in the Mac’s share of the overall PC market.”
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_macbook_neo
