How 50 years of moving fast and breaking stuff led to MacBook Neo

What a funny coincidence that Apple’s 50th anniversary celebrations took place the same month the company introduced the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop that has the potential to take the Mac to new heights.

The fact that Apple was founded in 1976 and the MacBook Neo exists in 2026 should have nothing in common, but they both involve a company called Apple. But that’s not true: Apple’s product philosophy is more continuous than you might imagine, and that chain that begins with the Apple I ends, 50 years later, in a colorful new MacBook Neo.

Apple was born into a chaotic world. Dozens of personal computer companies made the first devices, and each of them was its own island with its own software running on custom hardware. New chips and new hardware innovations like floppy disk drives (did you know that early Apple computers could only read data from audio cassettes?!) meant that as an IT company you either scale quickly or you die.

Of course, most of them are dead. But Apple didn’t, in part because it was always adopting the next big thing to survive. It’s a state of mind that I have always associated with Steve Jobs, a man without absolute sentimentality. Apple has always been a company that knows it must move quickly to survive.

Apple

It is a factor that has remained present in corporate culture, to varying degrees, for 50 years. It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about taking care of its customers: it has managed three chip transitions and an operating system transition on Mac while providing solid support over a transition period.

One of the reasons this culture has strengthened is that Apple has never been the dominant ecosystem player in any market in which it competes. (The iPod was dominant, but not really an ecosystem.) When you’re dominant, like PCs driven by Microsoft’s DOS and Windows operating systems, the name of the game is compatibility. Once you have the majority of the market, it’s all about consolidation.

Over time, stability and compatibility have become one of the main reasons for Microsoft’s success. Old Windows applications continued to work. Microsoft built an entire culture focused on supporting its enormous customer base, many of whom were using legacy hardware and software.

The problem with this strategy is that it really isn’t suited to times of great opportunity. As former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky recently wrote, Microsoft’s greatest strength suddenly became its greatest weakness. “The lure and push of everlasting compatibility was not just the ‘DNA of Windows,’ but it was the soul of what made Windows successful and sacred. »

Apple

The funny thing is that Sinofsky wrote this in the context of praising the MacBook Neo, among other things. Here’s why: Apple has constantly upgraded its operating system and ecosystem, from drivers to APIs to apps and the chips that run them. He was able to advance his technology in ways that Microsoft never could.

Part of that was adopting touchscreen interfaces with the iPhone and iPad. It’s not that Microsoft didn’t have good ideas for touch interfaces (some of the things it did were really cool!) but that ultimately its loyal customers dragged it into the abyss. The first touch version of Microsoft Office worked on the iPad. Microsoft’s touch devices have reverted to older mouse-driven versions.

The crowning achievement of all this was Apple’s adoption of its own ARM-based chip architecture. Again, it’s not as if Microsoft and its chip partners don’t see the strength that an Apple-style chip strategy could have. That’s because Microsoft’s customers simply weren’t interested in losing compatibility with their huge investment in Intel PCs, and Microsoft’s commitment to “managing everything forever,” as Sinofsky calls it, hampered any attempts to see things differently.

In the other corner: Apple, which for more than five years has been marketing Macs equipped with ARM processors, in addition to a version of macOS that spent years preparing for this transition by removing compatibility with many old software that would have made this transition a challenge.

Eugene Wegmann

This brings us to the MacBook Neo. This is the result of the fact that Apple is not afraid to break compatibility with 32-bit applications, with old Carbon APIs, with Intel processors, it works. Part of the magic is that as Mac users, we often don’t even notice when Apple does this, because it has become quite good at making the migration easier for us. (Software developers have had a harder time, often spending summers modifying their applications so that they will still work when new versions of the operating system ship in the fall.)

50 years later, that’s still Apple’s fundamental approach: don’t be afraid to change. Don’t be afraid to leave old things behind. Not because change isn’t painful, but because it often is. But because without change, without the ability to move forward, you will never be able to take advantage of new opportunities. And if you’re Apple, you’ll never be able to make a MacBook Neo.