By John Moltz
March 6, 2026 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: She comes in (soft) colors

All hail the MacBook Neo! All hail John Ternus! Also, there were some other things, I guess.
The MacBook Neotbook
Apple astounded this week by announcing the cheapest Mac laptop… EVAH!
“Apple introduces colorful MacBook Neo at $599”
Pretty exciting, right?
You’d think. But a lot of comments from Apple fans were oddly reminiscent of the first comments about the iPod: “No MagSafe. One port is USB 2. [ableist pejorative redacted].”
It was never going to be cheap and have all the features of the MacBook Air. How could you think that? Probably for the same reason you keep trying coconut water and thinking maybe this time you’ll like it. You’re not going to like it, Jeff! It’s objectively terrible! Give it up!
Remember netbooks? Sure you do. The year was 2009. The hit song was “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” proved that Wes Anderson can make even stop motion characters annoyingly twee, and netbooks could be had three for a penny.…