Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
The MacBook Neo’s Price, Looking to the Past and Future
Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:
I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.
Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)
‘Never the Same Game Twice’
John McCoy:
From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley, whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for their novel plastic components.
Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication, and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact, I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot of them were re-skinned versions of the basic race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.
These games mostly sucked but they looked cool as shit. Lot of memories for me in this post.
Another Steve Jobs Quote on Lower-Priced Macs
Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008:
There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
Harry McCracken, writing at the time:
With that out of the way, the question that folks have been asking lately about whether Apple will or should release a netbook-like Mac is fascinating. Regardless of whether the company ever does unveil a small, cheap, simple Mac notebook, it’s fun to think about the prospect of one. And I’ve come to the conclusion that such a machine could be in the works, in a manner that’s consistent with the Apple way and the company’s product line as it stands today. I’m not calling this a prediction. But it is a scenario.
Apple made many $500 “computers” in the years between then and now. But they were iPads, not Macs. I think part of the impetus behind the MacBook Neo is an acknowledgement that as popular as iPads are, and for as many people who use them as their primary larger-than-a-phone computing device, there are a lot of other people, and a lot of use cases, that demand a PC. And from Apple, that means a Mac.