Apple's First Budget Laptop Cost More Than Two MacBook Neos
Editors' Note: Welcome to our ongoing An Apple a Day series, where we’ll share Apple stories and video from our archives daily from now through late September. In addition to PCMag, this series includes pieces from our sibling sites CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, and Popular Science."The Apple iBook is a looker, that's for sure," PC Magazine's Jon Hill wrote in his review of the colorful, translucent laptop in the Dec. The release set in motion the company's tiered approach to the laptop market, most recently evidenced by the budget-priced and very compelling MacBook Neo.
- ▪Editors' Note: Welcome to our ongoing An Apple a Day series, where we’ll share Apple stories and video from our archives daily from now through late September.
- ▪In addition to PCMag, this series includes pieces from our sibling sites CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, and Popular Science."The Apple iBook is a looker, that's for sure," PC Magazine's Jon Hill wrote in his review of the colorful, translucent
- ▪The release set in motion the company's tiered approach to the laptop market, most recently evidenced by the budget-priced and very compelling MacBook Neo.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/articles/apples-first-budget-laptop-cost-more-than-two-macbook-neos |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 26 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T12:21:52.421Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T12:21:52.421Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RqG7bTJty4AK · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Editors' Note: Welcome to our ongoing An Apple a Day series, where we’ll share Apple stories and video from our archives daily from now through late September. In addition to PCMag, this series includes pieces from our sibling sites CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, and Popular Science."The Apple iBook is a looker, that's for sure," PC Magazine's Jon Hill wrote in his review of the colorful, translucent laptop in the Dec. 1, 1999 issue. "But can it live up to the hype?" The answer, as you'll see in the review reprinted below, was mixed. (By the way, did you know that you can read issues from PC Magazine's print archive on Google Books?)The iBook (base price: $1,599) was positioned as an affordable alternative to Apple's popular but expensive PowerBooks.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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