‘They’re just cheap laptops’: Steve Jobs once derided netbooks, and now Apple’s made one in the MacBook Neo — and that’s a great thing

If you're as old as I am, you might remember the early-2000s demands for Apple to make a netbook, which was a super-cheap lightweight laptop that cost pennies compared to a normal PC.

Steve Jobs wasn't impressed, deriding them as "cheap laptops"; he also said that Apple simply didn't know how to make a $500 computer that was not "a piece of junk". So Apple made the MacBook Air and then the iPad instead.

Today, though, Apple launched the MacBook Neo — and it's definitely a cheap laptop. But crucially, while it's a $500 computer (if you can get the educational discount; it's a $599 computer for the rest of us) it's not a piece of junk.