How 50 years of Apple culture led to the MacBook Neo (Macworld/Jason Snell)

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

The facts that Apple was founded in 1976 and the MacBook Neo exists in 2026 shouldn’t have anything in common but that they both involve a corporation called Apple. But that’s not right: Apple’s product philosophy is more continuous than you might imagine, and that string that starts with the Apple I ends, 50 years later, in a colorful new MacBook Neo.

Apple was born in a chaotic world. Dozens of personal computer companies were building early 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 the earliest Apple computers could only read data from audio cassettes?!) meant that as a computer company, you evolved rapidly or you died.

Most of them died, of course. But Apple didn’t, in part because it was always adopting the next big thing in order to survive. It was a mindset that I always connected to Steve Jobs, a man with absolutely zero sentimentality. Apple has always been a company that knows that it needs to move forward rapidly to survive.

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

One reason this culture got reinforced is that Apple has never been the dominant ecosystem player in any market it’s competed in. (The iPod was dominant, but not really much of 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’ve got the bulk of the market, it’s all about consolidation.

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