John Siracusa

But the cost of TVs has gone through the floor because back when my parents were young, buying a TV was like buying a new car.

And now it's like, whatever, like I'll get one.

I'll impulse buy one at Costco because you can get it.

You can get a pretty big flat screen TV for a couple hundred bucks.

Right.

And computing power is like that.

And Apple has been slow, slow and reluctant to leverage that.

But what's happening slowly but surely is and we've seen it with smartphones, is that the amount of compute needed to do.

Basic web browsing and word processing has just been getting cheaper and cheaper because the demands of basic web browsing and word processing, although especially web browsing, has increased.

It has not increased as fast as computing power has increased.

And I would argue for, like, basic word processing and even, like, image editing, that is kind of, like, flatlined in that most people...

never need to do any more sophisticated image editing, setting aside AI stuff, which is a whole other thing, than they can do on any recent laptop.

And the same thing with text editing.

Like, you're typing and spell checking, that's not really changing that much, despite software being sloppier, right?

So it behooves Apple and any company to say...

As Gruber was pointing out, Apple used to claim, and I think they were correct, they could not make a laptop that met their quality standards at a price point that was competitive with the lowest end of the PC market.

They still can't, but the low end of the PC market has gone so far down that there is now room below the MacBook Air for another computer.

And I would say that...

You know, the the Apple of old that was more premium might say, oh, the Neo doesn't quite meet our quality standards.

But like you could see someone arguing saying, yeah, but it's really close.