Last week Apple launched a new low-cost laptop called the MacBook Neo. Much of the commentary about it focuses on the fact that it was built to a price and the compromises that entailed.

These commentators know nothing of compromise.

Let me tell you about the ZX81, the early eighties computer that inspired the name of this site¹.

Disappointed that the Neo has sRGB rather than P3 Wide Colour? How about two colours? Only 8Gb of memory. Could you manage with 1Kb? Dual speakers? How about no sound at all? A mechanical trackpad? What if pressing a key made the screen flicker?

These all sound like crazy limitations. Even in 1981, some were not happy with them. There were computers with colour, sound, reasonable (for the time) amounts of memory, and usable keyboards. But none of them were on sale for £69, or about £285 in 2026 money.

For context, the “low cost” Apple II could be bought for £549, or over £2000 in today’s money².

Sinclair really, really pushed for the low cost. The whole machine has four chips (many modern machines have more). You could get it even cheaper if you were prepared to assemble it yourself. The famous membrane keyboard was barely usable but worked. You used your TV rather than a monitor. A tape cassette instead of a disk drive.

But why go to these lengths? Did they go too far? In today’s money, it’s still half the cost of the MacBook Neo.

The thing to remember in 1981 is that no one knew what home computers were good for. There was no Internet. Packaged software was still a pretty new concept. Computers were The Future and you didn’t want to get left behind, but it wasn’t entirely clear what you’d be missing out on. They were educational, maybe fun. Ultimately, people wanted one… but didn’t really know why.

Very few people would be willing to speculate by spending over £2000 on an Apple II, but plenty – over 1.5 million – of people were willing to risk £300 on a ZX81. For many of these people, the alternative to a ZX81 wasn’t an Apple or VIC-20, it was no computer at all.

And despite the limitations, users managed to do amazing things. Someone wrote a working chess program. There’s a monster maze game. It’s fair to say that many Gen X developers started their careers on a ZX81. A more expensive machine would not have had the same impact.

I never had a ZX81. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the ZX81’s successor, a slightly less limited machine that was still very much designed to a price point. It was mocked by the kids with richer parents, but the quirks created by the cost cutting gave the machine a unique character.

None of this is true for Apple’s new laptop. Apple hasn’t changed. It’s more like the Apple II than the ZX81. You can get Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops if you want to spend less; maybe they are junk, as Steve Jobs described them. In modern term, the ZX81 is more like a Raspberry Pi. A computer designed to a price, to get one into as many hands as possible. In that sense, it’s absolutely not junk. It was just designed with different goals.