[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Apple executives said the MacBook Neo has received a strong initial response a month after its launch, while also mentioning the early MacBook Air and Apple Maps as representative past failures.

On April 15, IT outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus (존 터너스) and marketing chief Greg Joswiak (그렉 조스위악) recently discussed Apple’s product strategy and past failures in an interview with Tom’s Guide.

The interview focused squarely on the MacBook Neo. Inside Apple, the view is that the MacBook Neo has drawn a good market response a month after launch. Ternus explained what sets it apart from products in the same price range. He stressed that its competitiveness lies not only in value for money but in overall product quality.

Ternus described how the MacBook Neo differs from rival products. Apple appears to be positioning it not simply around price-to-performance but around the overall user experience. With reactions continuing after launch, Apple is showing a push to build the MacBook Neo into a new pillar of its entry-level Mac lineup.

The interview also touched on next-generation product categories Apple could pursue. Responding to a question about Apple Glasses, Joswiak laid out his view on the category’s “inevitability.” The timing of any launch or specific development plans were not confirmed, but it was confirmed that Apple is not fully ruling out the area.

In the conversation, held to mark Apple’s 50th anniversary, there was also a question about past failures. Joswiak cited the “first MacBook Air,” released in 2008, as one of Apple’s failures. While it is now an iconic product line, he said the early model fell short of expectations in terms of completeness and market response.

Ternus cited the notoriously troubled “Apple Maps at launch” as a representative failure. Apple Maps drew heavy criticism at the time over accuracy and service quality, and Apple later moved to improve it over a long period. That senior executives again cited it as a failure underscores that even products that succeed today can face trial and error early on.

The remarks show Apple is highlighting new-product performance while treating past failures as part of the development process rather than something to hide. For a product in a new price band such as the MacBook Neo to take hold, what matters is not only early sales response but whether the product line becomes established over the long term. Apple’s emphasis in the interview on signs of early momentum for the MacBook Neo aligns with that view.

The interview went beyond checking on the MacBook Neo’s performance and also revealed how Apple judges product success and failure. Joswiak’s choice of the first MacBook Air and Ternus’s choice of Apple Maps as failures suggest that even today’s core product lines did not start out fully formed. That leaves whether the MacBook Neo can become a long-term lineup, beyond short-term popularity, as the next point to watch.