Apple hardware engineering chief John Ternus and marketing chief Greg Joswiak recently did an interview with Tom's Guide, where they shared new insights into the MacBook Neo, AI, and spatial computing.

Ternus and Joswiak made it clear that the ‌MacBook Neo‌ isn't your average low-cost device. Apple doesn't typically put a lot of focus on its more affordable devices, but marketing for the Neo has been expansive, and that's because Apple sees it as a "reinvention" of the entry-level laptop. From Ternus:

I think maybe another one from our past is this idea that Steve talked about is the Mac being the bicycle for the mind, right? And you know, from the very beginning, the vision was let's make personal computing as accessible to as many people as possible. And that was the mission of the MacBook Neo.

Ternus said the ‌MacBook Neo‌ required "building something completely new from the ground up" to provide customers with quality at a low price. "We never want to ship junk," he said. "We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience."

Joswiak said the ‌MacBook Neo‌'s quality was important to Apple, and the Neo's build sets it apart from competitors.

You know the products in this space that it's competing against. They're plastic, they're little, you can flex them. They're so cheap, because what have they done? They just tried to cut a nickel, cut a quarter, cut a dollar out of everything to try to make it cheaper, and as a result, they made it cheap, which is very different than making it a lower price and high value, which was the approach we were taking.

Along with discussing the Neo, Ternus and Joswiak talked about the differences between the iPad and the Mac. Ternus said that Apple isn't going to merge the products, and similarities are because Apple focuses on what would make a device better and not on how one product might impact another.

We're going to make the best iPad we can possibly make. We're going to make the best Mac we can possibly make. Some customer is going to choose one, some customer is going to choose the other. A lot of customers actually like to have both, and that's great too. So yeah, we never think about... there's never been this idea of mashing these two things together.

On AI, which is an area where Apple has been struggling, Joswiak said it's not a sprint.

We've been doing things with intelligence for many years, right? And gen AI allows us an opportunity to do that even more. So I'm excited about that, but boy, this is not a sprint. This is a marathon, right? We're going to be doing stuff with intelligence for decades, not months or years.

Joswiak dodged a question about a potential touchscreen MacBook Pro, which Apple is rumored to be working on for launch as soon as this year. He also declined to comment on smart glasses, but said we're in the "early innings of spatial computing," while Ternus said that combining the digital and physical world is an "inevitability." The two were tight-lipped about any upcoming Apple products, but Joswiak said Apple is "working on some pretty cool stuff."

The full interview, which goes into more detail on the ‌MacBook Neo‌, AI, and includes a Steve Jobs anecdote, is well worth watching.