Apple is reportedly working on an affordable laptop with an iPhone chip. It could be a miniature transaction, a decision driven by supply chain economics, and the fact that the M1 MacBook Air continues to sell well at Walmart. Or it could be huge, a return to form for a company that once seemed to have a clear purpose for each of its devices but whose lineup is more confusing than ever.
We hope Apple chooses the latter approach, and we have an idea of what it might look like: iBooka line of laptops once so pioneering that Phil Schiller had to jump off a shelf onto a mattress to prove his technical prowess. We may be able to leave the toilet bowl in 1999, but the spirit of these devices is such that we would like to return someday.
ON this episode Vergecast, Nilay and David talk about whether this inexpensive Mac is really coming and what it might be. But first, they need to learn about artificial intelligence. Amazon and Perplexity are in a dispute over agent shopping, which provides a useful framework for the entire fight over artificial intelligence. (We like to call this the DoorDash problem.)
Then it was time for the iBook. Seriously, if you’ve never seen the 1999 announcement where CEO Steve Jobs also hula-hoops over an iBook to prove it doesn’t have wires, you have to go and watch.
Finally, in a lightning round, it was time for another round of Brendan Carr to Dummy, plus news about party speakers and the Trump Phone, and a game of “name that sound logo.”
If you want to learn more about everything we cover in this episode, here are some links to get you started with AI:
And in the lightning round: