There's something almost perverse about taking Steve Jobs's sneaker of choice, the shoe of late-'00s keynote podiums, of black turtlenecks and minimalist dogma, and slapping a hiking-boot mudguard on it. New Balance did it anyway, and the result is the Made in USA 992 in Medusa Green. It's a dad shoe that wants to be a trail shoe, and it shouldn't work. It probably does.
Let's be clear: this is not a hiking shoe. It has Abzorb cushioning in the heel and forefoot, suede overlays, and mesh panels. It will not keep your feet dry on a wet ridge. But that's not the point. The point is that New Balance took a silhouette defined by its association with one of the most famously unadventurous dressers in tech history and gave it a personality that Jobs would have absolutely hated. The upper splits clean in half, Medusa Green on top, Thunder Brown suede on the bottom, and the contrast is deliberate, almost jarring. It looks like a shoe that got dressed in the dark and decided it liked the look. That is the razor clam in this spec sheet: the 992, a shoe that has spent nearly two decades as the uniform of people who don't think about shoes, suddenly becomes a shoe that forces you to think about it.
New Balance is doing something interesting here, and it's worth watching closely because the same impulse is showing up in other corners of the product world right now. Nothing’s See-Through Earbuds Got Stuck Under the Wrong Brand, a product that should have been a CMF all along, proves that branding can sometimes fight the logic of the design itself. The 992 in Medusa Green faces the opposite problem: the design fights the branding. Jobs never wore this colorway. The sneaker's entire cultural weight comes from its association with a man who famously wore the same thing every day. To put it in hiking colors is to deliberately sever that tie and see what the shoe becomes on its own terms. That's a gamble.
For $200, available October 29, you are getting a Made in USA shoe that is absolutely not for the trail, but borrows enough visual language from hiking boots to make you wonder if you could get away with wearing it on one anyway. You probably could, for a short walk, and you'd look better doing it than anyone in actual Merrells. But the real question is whether the 992 can survive outside the Jobs halo. New Balance seems to think so, and the Aminé collab last month, summer-camp browns, no hiking pretensions, suggests the brand is testing how far it can push the silhouette before the nostalgia snaps. This colorway pushes further. The teal stitching is a weird little flourish that doesn't match anything else on the shoe. That's the detail to watch: it's either a sign that New Balance is willing to let the 992 get genuinely weird, or it's a one-off before they retreat back to grey and navy.