Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month and to celebrate and to kick off Tom's Guide's relaunch, we wanted to bring in two very special guests in Jaz and John Turnus to talk about Apple's past, present, and maybe future in terms of some of their products. So, let's start with...
And I did say maybe. I did say maybe, right? So, let's start with one phrase that comes to mind just because it's coming up in a lot of places is think different, right? So, if there's one product over the last 50 years, maybe something that you worked on in particular, what product would that be? And then I had a follow-up on the MacBook Neo, but like for both of you, what is the product that embodies that think different mentality?
Well, all right, again, you know me, Mark. Mac is what brought me here. iPod changed the trajectory of the company and iPhone changed the world. So, I'm going to have to give you three products.
Yeah, my answer's even worse because... Look, everything we do, even if our customers and users don't necessarily see it, everything we do has some new ideas in it. Have new materials, new electrical design, silicon design, you know, any of those things. And to me, like creativity and invention is fundamentally an act of thinking different, right? And so, we feel like we're doing it all the time because we're always trying to push and make the products better. So, I can't point to one product because I feel like it's in all of the products.
Okay, that's a good non-answer. The just getting to the MacBook Neo itself, I think you could make the case, you know, that it is a full circle moment for the brand. You know, so, what would you sort of trace back to those early days in the garage? And like, how does it potentially bring the Mac itself full circle after these 50 years?
Well, for me maybe I'll start. I joined in '86, right? So, I joined after the garage. Apple had it just about 10 years old. And then Apple went off the rails for a little bit, right? So, I like to tell people that even though I started in '86, what happened before '97 really kind of doesn't count for me. So, I'll start at '97, which is, you know, we were a company almost out of business, right? Literally. And Steve came back and Think different was more than just a marketing slogan, right? He had to explain to the world why did Apple need to exist? We were 3% market share, struggling to stay in business, Windows PCs dominated. And by the way, he had to explain to us Apple employees why did we need to be here? Why did we need to exist? And the reality was that the PC industry was not exactly innovative in those days. Right? It was all a matter of how do you cut a nickel here, a quarter here, a dollar here in order to make the cheapest beige box you could. Because that's what they were all competing against. And Steve wanted the world to know that Apple and let us to know Apple needed to exist because somebody had to have the courage to think different. Someone had to have the courage to do different things. And Mark, I mean, how prophetic that was in 1997 and to see what that thinking turned into. Obviously starting originally with the iMac, the Bondi blue iMac that shattered what people thought of as far as PCs were going. iPod and iTunes, which revolutionized the music industry. iPhone and the App Store, which changed the world, changed all of our daily lives. iPad, you know, magical sheet of glass that redefined a category. Apple Watch, our daily companion that, you know, for your fitness, your health, keeping you connected at just a glance. AirPods changed the way that people listen to music and cut the cords, you know, from our wireless device that why would you should you have a cord and a magical pairing and of course, you know, Apple Vision Pro, which reached into the future to show us how the digital world and the physical world could be combined and incredible services, you know, Apple Pay and iCloud and Apple TV, you know, and then leading all the way to what you said, you know, I think the MacBook Neo is a great embodiment of that because it completely rethought different, right? When John and his team is to how do you do a lower priced but incredibly high value laptop. And so, it's perfectly in keeping with again this think different idea of this company that was almost out of business. So, to me that's what it means to me.
Yeah, and I think maybe another one that from our past is this idea that Steve talked about is the Mac being the bicycle for the mind, right? And you know, from the very beginning, the vision was let's make personal computing accessible to as many people as possible. And that was the mission of the MacBook Neo, right? And I think probably, you know, I wasn't here back then, but very much back in the very beginning, you had a team of people who were so excited to make this happen and to bring the Mac experience to so many people. And that was the kind of driving goal every single day for the MacBook Neo team and I think they did an amazing job at it.
Yeah, well, John's being very humble. He was a big part of that.
But what's unique about it is that like traditionally Apple has been known for making premium products. Like in this particular case, you were targeting a particular price point, but also not willing to compromise in terms of like the overall quality of it. It was a different sort of endeavor. Can you maybe just talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I mean, I think for us is I'm sure you know well, like we never want to ship junk, right? We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience, have that Apple quality. And to do that with the Neo required building something completely new from the ground up, right? Leveraging both the technologies we've been developing like Apple silicon, but also kind of the expertise that we've developed over many, many years of building Macs and building phones and building iPads and all of these things. And so, there's so much new in the MacBook Neo, right? We have a completely new trackpad design that is I think still better than any PC out there, but it's like it's absolutely amazing and it's completely brand new. We had to rethink how we made the enclosure, how it all came together. And by doing that and being very focused on it from the beginning, we were able to create something that I think the feedback has been amazing, which is people can't believe how, you know, what a high quality the product still hold the bar. We didn't lower the bar, right? We still made an amazing high quality Mac at this incredible price point.
Yeah, I think what you've done is actually make the competition start to scramble. I've read that. So, when you still when you make a product like this, you do have to make some tradeoffs, right? So, like there isn't a backlit keyboard, for example, or maybe you're using USB 3 and 2 as opposed to Thunderbolt. So, how do you decide what the right tradeoffs are to make, especially for the target audience?
Yeah, I think from the very beginning, the goal when we started was what makes a Mac a Mac, right? What are the essential components of a Mac? And it's a great display and it's a great keyboard and trackpad and incredible battery life. And let's focus on those things. The beauty is we have MacBook Air, we have MacBook Pro. So, if a customer needs more, if they need the ultimate performance, there's an amazing MacBook Pro that we just launched, right? They can go to the MacBook Air and get more battery life and other things. So, we didn't feel like we had to, you know, make compromises that we didn't like. We were able to build something that was truly the essence of a Mac. And if people want more, we have that as well.
Well, and the quality of build and quality of design and construction, you know, you pick up the MacBook Neo and right away you feel the quality, right? You feel how amazing this product is. And Mark, you know the products in this space that it's competing against. They're plastic, they're little you can flex them, they're so cheap because what have they done? They just tried to like again, cut a nickel, cut a quarter, cut a dollar out of everything to try to make it cheaper and as a result, they made it cheap, right? Which is very different than making it a lower price and a high value, which was the approach we were taking.
Yeah, I would say the display in particular definitely stands out in terms of the quality, the build quality itself, and the fact that there's no bloatware.
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. No, not at all.
Yeah, because it's right. A Mac I failed to mention that point. What makes a Mac? macOS makes a Mac, right? Like you get all of those things together and the macOS experience on MacBook Neo is just as great as the macOS on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, right? It is a true Mac.
But why but one thing that comes to mind though is like why Neo? A lot of people were saying, okay, so maybe we're going to get an SE because that usually connotes value across the different lines. So, but you went in a different direction with this with an entirely new name. So, why Neo?
Yeah, I mean, look, you could even make an argument did it should just call it MacBook. You know, that's what some people were expecting when we were working on this. And first of all, to do that would have left it without an identity. So, we did want to give it an identity. And we wanted something short and snappy, something that fit in with Air and Pro. But we also wanted something to convey its newness. And Neo literally means new, right? Or reinvention. And as we talked about, this is the reinvention, you know, of a laptop, a low-price, high-value laptop. So, to us Neo was the perfect name for it. And it's really nice because a lot of times names take a little while for people to get used to. This one like right away people are like oh I like it, you know. So we're very happy with that.
Cool. So what about you know now that this product is out there? One of the comments that we got on our first round of video was oh so it's just an iPad with the keyboard which I thought completely missed the point. At the same time you know iPad OS is becoming more Mac-like with some of the changes that you've made in terms of multitasking and how you open and close apps and that sort of thing. The lines are starting to blur but in your mind are they still very much distinct or are the lines blurring somewhat? Like where do you guys like stand on that?
That's a really good one. I mean they're different products, right? We love the iPad, we love the Mac, we love the iPhone, we love all of our products but I think what we always do is we always focus on how do we make a given product better? What are we doing next? What are we doing after that? We're always pushing and we never think about like well what impact if we did something here would it have on a product over here? Like we're going to make the best iPad we can possibly make. We're going to make the best Mac we can possibly make and some customer's going to choose one, some customer's going to choose the other. A lot of customers actually like to have both and that's great too. So yeah, we never think about there's never been this idea of mashing these two things together. There's this narrative outside that there is but that's never been the case.
Yeah, I mean and right from the very beginning you know there was obviously some overlap. I mean that's what was the case when we introduced it. But like John said we look we want to make our Macs the best personal computer we can be. We want to make the iPad this magical sheet of glass that makes it the best that it can be and think about you I'm not going to speak for you but I'm going to guess you might have both, you know. So many of our customers do. Well think about that. So you're even choosing that you're not converging them and yet it's not one, right? You're choosing now sometimes the iPad's better for this and the Mac's better for this and it's good to have them both and we love that.
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess if the MacBook Pro had a touch display that does not mean and I'm not saying that you're working on that but if it did have one that doesn't mean that you're going back on your word that the product lines are distinct because you would just be making one thing better for that target audience. Is that fair to say?
Well fortunately I don't we don't have that product. So I don't even know how I would answer that Mark.
So what about I mean you brought up earlier about like how Vision Pro was a sneak peek at the future and I just wanted to get your guys' opinion on the state of spatial computing overall just because I think a lot of people were talking about smart glasses as being like the next wave of computing. Obviously you have meta out there. Gemini glasses are coming etc. You already have a spatial computing product out there and I'm sure Vision OS wasn't created for just one device. You've already had a follow-up for example. But so what do you think of that not talking about your product plans but what do you guys think about that product category in general?
I you know look I think we're still very much in the early innings of spatial computing. We are super excited about it. I mean the Vision Pro is an extraordinary product. As John said it's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present. And it's continuing to like people are continuing to find exciting new use cases for it. There's a lot of compelling stuff in enterprise and medicine and other things and that's going to continue to grow. It's fun. We're at the beginning of the journey.
Yeah. John so how about for you? What do you think of that?
