Rumor has it, Apple is working on a low-cost MacBook. And not “low-cost for a Mac,” but a proper cheap laptop, possibly as low as $599. For a company that traditionally targets the more premium end of the market, this would be something of an about-face.
Of course, Apple takes great pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company isn’t going to simply take the innards of a MacBook Air, slap them in a cheap plastic case, and call it a day. Instead, Apple is supposedly building a smaller laptop, with a lower-resolution screen and an “entirely new design” around an iPhone processor.
That chip could be some version of the A19 found in the current iPhone lineup, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed earlier this year that the company was working on a laptop powered by last year’s A18.
If the idea of a small, low-cost laptop running on an ultralow-power chip feels familiar, well, it should — we used to call them netbooks. Netbooks erupted on the scene at a weird time in the late aughts, when we were transitioning to a web-first computing world.
What set netbooks apart from other laptops was their pursuit of portability, battery life, and rock-bottom prices at almost any cost. The original netbook, the ASUS Eee PC, came in two sizes (7-inch or 10-inch) and ran on Intel’s budget Celeron M processor. But even that slow, low-powered CPU was too demanding for the tiny Eee PC, and so ASUS underclocked it to just 630 MHz. (Yes, back in the halcyon days of 2007, we measured CPU speed in MHz, not GHz.)
Intel saw this emerging trend and built CPUs just for the netbooks called Atom. In many ways, Atom chips were Intel’s answer to the growing might of ARM, and even formed the basis for its tablet and smartphone efforts. It’s essentially the reverse of what Apple did, which took its mobile A-series processor and turned it into a powerful laptop chip. (And, now back again, it seems.)
As we all know now, netbooks were not long for this world. A number of things helped spell their demise. For one, most of them were just never particularly good. And the ones that weren’t awful tended to be a bit pricer. Sure, you could get a 7-inch Eee PC for around $200. But something more capable, like an HP Mini 210 HD, could set you back about $385 in 2010, depending on the configuration. When adjusted for inflation, that’s a hair over $577. As the prices of regular laptops came down, this didn’t seem like a particularly good deal anymore.
But two of the biggest culprits are undoubtedly the emergence of the Chromebook and the iPad. (We’ll save the discussion of the Chromebook for another day.) The iPad was introduced in 2010, and it immediately started eating into the netbook’s market share. By 2012, tablets had overtaken netbooks, and by 2013, netbooks were effectively dead. Sure, some still lingered around, and you had a spiritual successor in the Chromebook, but the iPad helped kill off the netbook in swift and spectacular fashion.
Many of the things that one might have used a netbook for — browsing the web, checking email, shouting into the void of what was then called Twitter — were now being handled better by the iPad. And, when paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad was actually a decent productivity machine, so long as your expectations were low.
And so, the netbook vanished.
But this new, cheaper MacBook, at least on paper, sounds like it might be borrowing a bit from the netbook blueprint. Some people will just never be able to adjust to the workflow of a tablet and keyboard combo. So Apple might be giving them a proper laptop form factor.
While we don’t know what the screen size will be, we do know it will be smaller than the current 13.6-inch MacBook Air. That could mean 13.3 inches, but perhaps Apple will bring back the 12-inch format or even revisit the 11-inch realm of its smallest Air model. That’s inching into netbook territory.
Pair all that with a mobile-first SoC that will handle everyday tasks and browsing with aplomb, but certainly won’t cut it for heavier tasks like video editing or gaming, and you have something that sounds like the original pitch for a netbook if you ask me. Apple will obviously never call its new affordable MacBook a netbook, but maybe by avoiding the name, it can make them cool again.
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![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://i1.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png?ssl=1 "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
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