MacBook Neo is Just the Beginning | Apple Interview with Joz & John Ternus

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.

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.

Yeah, I mean, I think for us is as 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 holds 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Well fortunately I don't we don't have that product. So I don't even know how I would answer that Mark.

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.

Well I mean look there's some inevitability to combining digital and physical world. That's what spatial computing was all about and as John just said and as we've said right we reached into the future with a product called the Vision Pro. Can't give you a timeline for you know when spatial becomes anything else but you know it's an inevitability, right? Of digital physical worlds coming together.

Yeah, I mean there's countless examples, right? Of where a digital element can augment the physical world and quite honestly vice versa. And some amazing experiences the work we've been doing with the NBA with streaming the games on Vision Pro and in immersive video is just mind-blowing. It's a completely different experience to be like wow I'm actually at this game and people have been super excited about that. So again we keep pushing and finding these new experiences and opportunities and yeah, I'm excited for the future of it.

Actually called it proactive if you remember Mark. We didn't even use machine learning or AI. We talked about how your devices could be proactive because they were learning these things. That was not my biggest marketing genius but we had a name.

Well first of all I'm not sure I'd use crossroads, right? I would use early innings. I mean this is still very early days in what is going on with intelligence and you know you've heard us give some of our thinking on it, right? We want to use intelligence meet the customers where they are to make our products and our features better. And by the way we've been doing that with intelligence for many years, right? And gen AI allows us an opportunity to do that even more, you know. So I'm excited about that but boy this is not a sprint. This is a marathon, right? We're going to be doing stuff with intelligence for decades not for months or years.

Yeah, and I think you know we never think about shipping a technology. We always think about how can we leverage technology to ship amazing products and features and experiences for our users and so that's how we think about AI is you know and you've already seen plenty of it like happening in different places. Live translation on AirPods and other things. It's like we're taking the technology and leveraging it into really meaningful experiences and that's how we think about approaching it.

Well I like what JT said because it is about these experiences not about the technology itself. Right? And again we see it as a way to make our products and our features better. I love it when those things are happening and somebody doesn't even necessarily know that it's AI, right? It's just better and that's what I think the world expects from us, right? We make things personal, we bring humanity to things, you know, we make it so that you don't have to be a chatbot expert in order to get the most out of that technology. We want the technology to come to you, right? And just make those experiences that you live through every day better whether you know you're using AI or not.

That's exactly right. It knows your habits, it knows I love that. I mean that is a great example. That was one of the quote unquote proactives, right? That we introduced maybe gosh more than 10 years ago which was the idea that it had a pretty good idea what app you needed to use next. It wasn't just random, right? You pull down as you said from the screen and it took a bunch of things that it knew about what was going on right now, what your habits were and had a pretty good shot of offering you up the right app.

Well the App Store is alive and well. I can tell you that. We are getting lots of great submissions and lots of great apps and intelligence is certainly part of those apps. So you know I think the rumors of its death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Yeah, I mean we are always kind of building upon what we've done in the past. You can see our whole product lines have been that way, right? I mean the iPhone was born out of what we've learned on the Mac and the iPod, right? The iPad was clearly like built out of what we learned on the phone. But also in terms of how we build our products we're doing that all the time and so you're right. You see things pop up in different places as we develop, you know, a new technology or we start working with a new material or things like that. And yeah, and the Neo there's so much good new stuff. It's certainly going to influence how we look at other products and how we can take kind of core technologies and pieces to make them better as well.

I'll go first. Well, look, again, I've been here for 40 of the 50, which is kind of nuts. So I have more stories than you have time, Mark, but if you ever want to grab a beer or glass of wine, I'll make you cry uncle at some point. I have so much, but I obviously during this very rare time for us to be reflective because as we talked about we're way more forward looking than we are backward looking, but this is kind of a special week and a special lead up to this. So we are reflective and I can't help but think of when Steve returned to the company. And our very first meeting with Steve because here again we were struggling to say the least at that point and we had a meeting with him, leaders in product marketing and leaders in engineering, our first meeting with him and I was working for Phil at the time, Phil Schiller, and you know, we weren't quite sure how to start the meeting and Phil says, 'Hey, do you want to show you our product road maps, which are, you know, our plans for the product for the next couple years?' And Steve stops and he says, 'No. Let's talk about where we're going. Because if we don't know where we're going, no map's going to get us there.' And we started to retrench our thinking and him reminding us that great companies fail because they forget about creating great products. And that we were going to put the product back at the focus of everything that we do. Right? It is and with this naive belief that if you create great products, there'll be a market for that. And again, first of all, our heads were like, 'Wow.' We'd never had a CEO who was telling us that we were going to talk about where we're going and how the products were going to be getting us there and how we were going to transform this business. And you know, talk about having us at hello. And then to see as I went through earlier to see all the different places that thinking took us, you know, and where we are today is it's been an incredible journey. I feel incredibly blessed to have spent the last 40 years of my life here and what's more exciting is all the great stuff we have in front of us because we are working on some pretty cool stuff, Mark, but I think that's what you wanted to hear from us, but we're not telling you about.

You know, I think it's been really fun, you know, again, we talked about this sort of odd sense of okay, we're going to spend a little time looking back, not a lot because we got lots to do, but to me there's this recognition and hearing a lot of the old stories and stuff like that that we really today the team here at Apple stands on the shoulders of giants, right? I mean, as I said before, there's so much everything we do is built on what came before, what we've done before and that makes me so excited for the future because I see where we are now and I just know things are going to keep getting better and better. I think, you know, one of my favorite stories and it actually was a you've probably heard it before, it was about Steve when he was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back and was just reflecting on you know, that the carpenter had made it beautiful. It finished the back as beautifully as the rest of it even though nobody was going to see it, right? And I think about that all the time because I think that perfectly exemplifies what we do here, right? And you know, we've been talking about the MacBook Neo. I mean, here is our most affordable Mac we've ever made and it's absolutely beautiful. And if you open it up and look inside, it's just as beautiful, right? And that's true on an iPhone Pro Max or a MacBook Pro or an iPad Pro, but it's also true on a MacBook Neo. That's what we do and so it's just been really good to kind of think about that and reflect on that because that is probably the best kind of clue as to where we're going in the future is we're going to keep pushing in that same way.

Yeah, I love that. So that's why the bottom of the MacBook Neo has the color matching feet. It's all a part of it. It's just every detail, exactly.

Thanks, Mark. Thank you, Mark.