Tag Archives: Apple

The iPhone Ultra Feels Like the Opposite of What People Want From Apple Right Now

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Something interesting happened when Apple released its most affordable Mac in years. The shelves emptied. Without the circus of a world-changing keynote or the pressure of a decade-long category bet, the MacBook Neo sold out. The sheer stillness around its success might be the loudest signal Apple’s product calendar has sent in a long time.

It would be easy to read that moment as a simple story about pricing. Cheaper product sells more. That is commerce 101. But the broader economic and design conversation is more interesting than that. The MacBook Neo did not succeed because it is cheap. It succeeded because it makes the value of owning a well-designed Apple laptop feel instantly, almost effortlessly, accessible. There is no fine print. No compromised chassis, no confusing lineup position, no asterisk that makes you feel like you settled. It is a real Mac at a price that does not require justification.

Designer: Apple

Contrast that with what Apple is likely building toward with the iPhone Fold. Foldables have been circling the conversation for years now, and every major Android manufacturer has taken a swing. Samsung’s Galaxy Z series, Google’s Pixel Fold, Motorola’s Razr revival; the form factor has matured enough to feel like a real category rather than a prototype. But it still has not broken into genuine mass-market territory. The numbers tell one story. The design tells another.

Fold a phone in half and you are immediately negotiating with physics. The crease is probably still there. The inner display, no matter how refined, still communicates “work in progress” to anyone running a finger across it. The hinge, while increasingly sophisticated, adds thickness and fragility that a flat slab simply does not carry. App ecosystems are still catching up. Battery life is still a compromise. These are not dealbreakers for a certain kind of buyer, but that buyer is the enthusiast, and enthusiasts alone do not make a product category.

Apple has historically entered categories late precisely because it waits until it can remove these friction points. The original iPhone did not invent the smartphone; it redesigned the experience of using one until the tradeoffs felt invisible. The AirPods did not invent wireless earbuds; they made pairing feel so frictionless that every alternative started feeling clunky by comparison. When Apple gets it right, the design makes the decision feel obvious. That is the standard the iPhone Fold will be held to, and right now, no foldable on the market has cleared that bar convincingly.

The Vision Pro is worth bringing into this conversation, carefully. Its commercial struggles were not purely a pricing problem, though the $3,499 entry point did not help. The deeper issue was behavioral. Wearing a spatial computer on your face asks something significant of the user; it separates you from the room, demands a specific posture, and narrows use cases in ways that feel limiting for most daily routines. Vision Pro is genuinely brilliant in ways that are hard to overstate, but brilliant and necessary are not the same thing. Expensive things can succeed when they feel necessary. When they feel like a solution searching for a problem, even the most sophisticated engineering loses the argument.

The iPhone Fold risks landing closer to Vision Pro than to MacBook Neo on that spectrum. Not because it will be a bad product, but because the “why” is still fuzzy for most consumers. A larger screen that folds into your pocket is appealing in theory. In practice, it means paying significantly more for a phone that is heavier, thicker when closed, and still slightly compromised in display continuity. The design wins have to be overwhelming to justify that list of concessions.

There is also the iPhone E to consider. Apple’s lower-cost iPhone has not exactly set records, which is where the argument gets complicated. It would be tempting to say consumers want value across the board, but the E’s underwhelming reception is not evidence against affordability; it is evidence that value without design conviction falls flat. A product can be inexpensive and still feel like a consolation prize, and no one wants to buy the version of Apple that does not quite believe in itself.

What the MacBook Neo proved is that conviction and accessibility are not opposites. When Apple makes something genuinely well-designed and prices it without apology, the market responds with conviction of its own. The lesson for the iPhone Fold is not to be cheap. It is to be undeniable. The crease needs to go, or come as close to invisible as current materials science allows. The hinge needs to feel architectural rather than mechanical. The software experience on the unfolded display needs to justify the real estate in ways that go well beyond “bigger screen.” The weight needs to stop reading as a penalty for wanting something different.

Until the iPhone Fold can walk into a room and make every other smartphone feel like it is leaving something on the table, the MacBook Neo’s sellout status is less a green light and more a mirror. Consumers are not rejecting premium products. They are rejecting expensive compromises. That is a distinction Apple knows better than anyone, and it is the only standard that will matter when the Fold finally arrives.

The post The iPhone Ultra Feels Like the Opposite of What People Want From Apple Right Now first appeared on Yanko Design.

These MacOS-inspired flip flops are weird, playful, and sadly don’t come with Apple “Find My”

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The mind of David Delahunty is something no LLM can capture. With the speed most marketing teams would be envious of, David churns out idea after idea on his Instagram, turning brands and visual icons into fun products that creatively challenge how you look at logos, shapes, and designs. We’ve covered a bunch before, including an MS Paint-inspired makeup kit, along with this Finder icon-inspired backpack. A recurring theme in Delahunty’s collection, the Finder icon ‘finds’ itself in a new avatar this time – interlocking flipflops.

A lot of his designs lean on heavy visual puns, which make for great eye-candy on Instagram, but on rare occasions they make for great products too! Delahunty’s made MacOS Finder-inspired necklaces (which you can still buy, btw), and it’s about time that these flipflops enter the production hall of fame too. They’re fairly uncomplicated, molded as a single-piece polyurethane flip-flop, with left and right units being blue and white respectively. And no, a Latina mother throwing these at a misbehaving child wouldn’t classify as ‘Airdrop’.

Designer: David Delahunty

When Bill Hernandez and Steve Jobs designed the original Finder icon, I doubt they realized what meme material it possessed. The icon is innately memorable, but it’s also easily reproducible as different products – Delahunty’s flipflops are a great example. The icon is split into two, making it perfect to turn into flipflops, although that weird jagged central cut is a sort of unique challenge when it comes to wearability. However, with a fair amount of planning, it’s easy to account for the fact that the flipflops aren’t entirely bilaterally symmetrical. I guess that’s the beauty about them.

Each shoe is made the same way Crocs are – molded as a single piece with no interlocking, stitching, or gluing of extra parts. This makes each flipflop incredibly strong, fairly comfortable, and long-lasting. The flipflops in question come with cutouts that depict the Finder icon’s face too, which I think is a great idea because they serve as ventilation, so your footwear doesn’t smell like death because the polyurethane isn’t particularly breathable. The cutouts are great for airing the footwear out after a day at the beach too, although try not to get sand into them through the cuts – it’s no fun dealing with gritty shoes rubbing against your feet like literal sandpaper.

Delahunty’s mind works much faster than most people’s hands, so a lot of his ideas get mocked up using AI (it’s honestly one of the best examples of AI enhancing someone’s workflow). That being said, a lot of tweaking needs to be done before these shoes hit production. If you do want to wear your love for macOS on your feet, however, give Delahunty a follow on Instagram and be sure to drop him a message!

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Why the $1,099 MacBook Air M5 beats the MacBook Neo for macOS 27

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Apple’s 2026 laptop lineup presents a clean, almost philosophical choice. On one side sits the MacBook Neo, a machine built around the powerful idea of access. It lowers the barrier to entry, putting a capable Apple notebook within reach of more people than ever. It is a compelling argument rooted in the present, designed to solve an immediate need for a good, affordable computer. For a few hundred dollars more, the M5 MacBook Air makes a different promise, one that is less about immediate savings and more about long-term value and capability.

For months, that choice felt ambiguous, a simple trade-off between price and power. The arrival of macOS 27, however, brought a new clarity to the decision. Apple’s vision for the next generation of its operating system, with its heavy reliance on sophisticated on-device AI, reframed the entire lineup. The question is no longer just about what you need today, but about which machine is properly equipped for the software you will be using tomorrow. The Neo gets you in the door; the M5 Air gets you a seat at the table.

Designer: Apple

The M5 chip is what separates these two machines, and that difference stands out far more now than it did at launch. Apple announced the M5 MacBook Air in March with doubled base storage and modest performance gains, framing it as a solid evolutionary update. The M5 features a 10-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU, but the real story lives inside those GPU cores. Each one includes a Neural Accelerator, a dedicated AI processing unit that dramatically increases the machine’s ability to handle on-device machine learning tasks. Apple explicitly positioned the M5 Air as capable of delivering up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than the M4 Air, and up to 9.5x faster than the M1 generation. Those numbers were abstract in March. After WWDC, they became a requirement.

macOS 27 Golden Gate leans heavily on Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of AI-powered features that process data locally rather than relying on cloud servers. Visual Intelligence, enhanced Spotlight with conversational AI capabilities, and system-wide machine learning workflows all depend on silicon that can handle the computational load without slowing down everyday tasks. The M5’s architecture was designed specifically to support this kind of workload at scale, making it the baseline for an uncompromised experience. Apple described the M5 Air as capable for Apple Intelligence across apps and system experiences, as well as for running large language models on device in enterprise environments. The Neo, with older silicon, may technically run macOS 27, but the gap between eligibility and capability is the entire value argument for spending more.

The storage equation also tilts decisively toward the M5 Air. Apple doubled the base configuration to 512GB, up from the 256GB that previous generations started with. That increase addresses one of the most persistent criticisms of Apple’s entry-level pricing strategy, particularly as on-device AI models require significant local storage to function properly. Larger machine learning models, extensive photo libraries processed with AI features, and the general expectation that a 2026 laptop should have breathing room all make 512GB feel like the real starting point. The $100 price increase over the previous M4 Air generation is easier to justify when half of it is effectively the cost of storage you would have upgraded to anyway. The Neo’s storage configuration was not surfaced in available reporting, but if it follows typical budget laptop patterns, it likely sits closer to the older 256GB baseline, which immediately creates friction for users planning to lean into Apple’s AI-forward software vision.

The M5 Air launched in March to a relatively muted reception, with early reviews treating it as a competent, predictable update rather than a transformational product. That framing was accurate at the time, because the machine’s value was not yet fully apparent. WWDC changed the story by revealing what the M5 was actually designed to do. The real product was never just the laptop; it was the laptop as a vessel for a more intelligent operating system. The Neo, by contrast, remains a strong value for users whose needs are defined by today’s software, but it starts to look underpowered the moment you project forward even a year.

The MacBook Air M5 is where Apple’s 2026 Mac story begins to feel aligned with its software ambitions. It is not the cheapest way into the ecosystem, but it may be the cheapest way to avoid compromise as macOS 27 arrives this fall. The Neo has its place, but for anyone planning to live on this machine for the next three to five years, the M5 Air is the safer, smarter, and ultimately more cost-effective choice. You can preorder both machines now through Apple’s website, but only one of them feels like it was built for the operating system Apple just announced.

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