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There's a horrible, partisan headline over on Macworld that speaks to a past that no one should want to revisit: "Apple-hating tech bros are lying to you." This headline refers to criticism of the MacBook Neo, and it's unfair and untrue. First, anyone who criticizes an Apple product is immediately an Apple hater, not just someone who may prefer other products. Secondly, now they're also "tech bros," an explicit new reduction that turns critics into sub-humans. And finally, people who criticize Apple or this product specifically aren't just incorrect, they actually know the truth and are lying to you. Only Macworld tells the truth, and the truth is that the MacBook Neo is f#$king fantastic regardless of what anyone thinks.

Yeah, we all miss the "Mac vs. PC" days. That was a good time. But instead of reducing those who disagree with opinions to being sub-human liars, I'll just point out that we all have opinions. And that some are more educated than others. That doesn't mean that those with a firm grasp of history and facts are always right. Nor does it mean that Macworld's opinion of the MacBook Neo is wrong, though the way it frames those who disagree with it is 100 percent wrong and wrong-headed.

What's lacking in this discussion is perspective.

Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and if you're familiar with that history, you will see a familiar story playing out now. This company, which has only seen success making expensive, high-end products, is now trying to foist lower-end and lower cost products on its customer base. This isn't the first time it's done so. And it's never gone well.

Consider the Apple of the 1990s, which expanded its Mac lineup dramatically with Power Macs, Mac Classics, Mac LCs, Mac Centris, and Mac Quadra models before fully losing its mind and its way with the Mac Performa series for mainstream consumers. The Performa line started off as cheaper versions of existing Macs, but before it was finally killed off it had expanded to—wait for it—over 60 different models.

The Apple of that era was chasing a dream and it's a dream that will be familiar to anyone trying to understand what it's doing today. 15 years after Steve Jobs' passing, Tim Cook has brought Apple back to the point it was when Jobs returned to the company in the late 1990s and immediately slashed almost all of its too-many Mac models and other products. There are too many versions of Apple's products today, and with that expansion comes the inevitable confusion and, yep, decline in value. This is not enshittification per se, but it's trending in that direction.

Look, sometimes you really do get what you pay for. This has long been true with Apple's hardware products, devices that tend to be higher cost but also of higher quality than the competition. This has been the strategy for the company in the modern era, just as it was at its inception, when the expensive Apple II series of computers competed against much less...