Apple Introduces New Affordable MacBook Neo

Let's take a look at the new MacBook Neo. 

Apple just had three days of announcements. They announced a lot of new products. But almost all of them were just updates to existing products. However, the last thing Apple announced was a completely new product and, in fact, a new Mac. The first completely new Mac in a while, since Mac Studio. It's a MacBook called the MacBook Neo. So this fills the spot that Apple hasn't had for a, while, since the last product called just the MacBook. That is a low-end inexpensive MacBook. So something priced low with low specs. Kind of for entry level people like if you are just a regular home user, you don't have any special like work requirements for your Mac or you're a student, this is a great machine. 

It's also really good if you happen to have a powerful desktop, like me, and you want a second Mac, something you can carry around with you but you know you don't need to rely on it for work tasks because your main Mac handles that. 

So, the main feature of the MacBook Neo is certainly its price. It really is. $599 is the starting price. There's a $699 model as well but it should be noted that the educational pricing puts the cheaper model at $499 and the other model at $599. So, the whole range is $499 to $699 and that's it!. You can't go more expensive than that. Having a $499 MacBook is really something. So that's definitely the main thing here and everything else about this product really is based around that. It being an inexpensive model. Apple has got plenty of more expensive MacBooks available for people that want more power. This is for people where price is the main consideration. 

So where does it cut corners here in order to get that low price? Well, the processor, memory, battery, and available options. Those are the four main cutbacks here to get to that low price. I'll look at each one of those. 

I mentioned that there are two models. That's it. Just two and there are no other options. You can't upgrade storage. You can't upgrade memory. You have simply two things to choose from when you're buying one of these. One is the $599 model ($499 for education). One's the $699 model ($599 for education). They both come with the same everything except for two differences. One is that the more expensive model has double the storage. So instead of 256 gigs you get 512 gigs of internal storage. Those are the only two options. You can't go above that even if you want to pay for it. 

The other difference is Touch ID. The more expensive model has a Touch ID button  at the top right corner of the keyboard. This is an extremely convenient function. It's also good for security not to have to enter in your passcode all the time so you're not tempted to have a short passcode and somebody can't see it over your shoulder. So those are both really good deals. I think $100 to double your storage and get Touch ID makes the more expensive model a winner. Of course, I've said in the past that 256 gigs is not enough storage for a Mac unless you're not storing anything on it. Like you're really not downloading any third party apps or games or anything like that. You're not storing your photos on it. You're not working with any big video files. There are plenty of people that like that. A lot of students work with documents completely online in Cloud Services. A lot of people just work with word processing documents and never deal with photos and videos and all. But for anyone else you definitely want to go to the higher level.

I think a lot of people are really going to criticize the Neo for only having 8 gigs of RAM. No way to upgrade that. But I think that's fine for an economy model like this. I see how well my M2 MacBook Air works with only 8 gigs of RAM. I think for the intended audience 8 gigs will work out okay. You certainly can get a MacBook Air which starts with 16 gigs of RAM if that is your concern. Apple wanted to keep the price low here and of course RAM prices have been reported as getting higher. So Apple needed to do this in order to produce the model.  

So it is worth noting that it does come in four colors. In actuality not only do you have to choose between the two models but you have to choose a color too. You've got this silver color but you also have Blush, Citrus, and it's called Indigo. So it is kind of a blue. Now besides the color, physically this looks a lot like a MacBook Air. It is slightly different in size. It is thicker than the MacBook Air. You can see the MacBook Air comes at .44" and it's a solid .5" for the MacBook Neo. But the width and depth are slightly less. So it does kind of have the appearance of being slightly smaller than the MacBook Air. But when it is all said and done the weight is exactly the same. I think this is important because if you want the lightest MacBook and you don't really need any kind of power, the MacBook Air isn't the winner here. It is now the MacBook Neo because it is the same and it is much, much cheaper than the MacBook Air. 

As a matter of fact if we want to compare the prices here we can see there's that $599 or $699 for the Neo. But let's look at the low end here. $599 for the Neo. Then if you want to go with the cheapest MacBook Air it's $1099! So significantly more expensive. Other differences are the Display. Obviously if you're working with photos and videos professionally you're going to be using a MacBook Pro because you have that really good display. But if you're not then you have a 13" or 13.6" display for the Neo compared to the Air. So it's definitely slightly bigger display for the Air but it is worth nothing that for the higher price point for the MacBook Air you're getting a lot more. You're getting an M5 processor as opposed to the special processor that we will talk about in a minute in the Neo. You get double the memory, 16 gigs of memory. You're starting at a 512 gig drive instead of half of that. 

Speaking of that processor this is the main thing that makes the Neo different from every other MacBook. It doesn't have an M series processor in it. The first Mac for sale that doesn't. It has an A18 Pro Processor. What's that? Well, that's the chip that's in the iPhone 16 Pro. So Apple took an iPhone chip and put it in a Mac. Now, the architecture has been similar all along. As a matter of fact iPads use both, those A processor chips and the M processor chips. So Apple simply swapped in a cheaper processor and we're going to see for the first time how in practice using one of these iPhone processors in a Mac really works. 

So it actually got fewer cores in it. It's got two powerful cores and four high efficiency cores, you know, for using less power as compared to many more cores for, you know, M5 processor. But for single core tasks, a lot of apps still just use one processor and they just get their stuff done with that, that is pretty comparable to a M4 Mac. It's only with multi-processors things, probably you know rendering lots of video and stuff like that, that it'll probably drop back to kind of like the M1 from like 2020 in terms of performance. So we'll have to see. But again, if you're buying this machine you're not looking for performance. If you want performance, you're still on a budget, you can get the MacBook Air. If you really need performance you can get the MacBook Pro. 

Another question is does getting the higher version of this, the one with the 512 gig SSD in it, does that improve performance? Certainly most people would have more space available for swap memory. So it would improve performance there. But also if they divided up the SSD's, so there's two of them, two 256 gig ones, it could mean faster speeds for the SSD which could speed up the Mac in general. 

So let's talk about the Ports. The ports are another place Apple cutback. First thing you'll notice is there's no MagSafe charging port. So, no MagSafe Charger. You simply charge by plugging into one of the two USB ports. That's fine and it's great because, you know, you could use your iPhone charger to charge this if you wanted to. But there's no Thunderbolt port here. So you can't hook up to any kind of Thunderbolt device. That's part of the whole this using the A18 Pro Processor instead of a M processor here. There's no Thunderbolt support, which should be fine because of these two ports here, the USB3 port, the one towards the back. That also supports the Display Port. So you can hook up a second screen to this. It supports one additional 4K screen. That's also going to be useful for connecting to, say, a you know a projector or something for presentations. 

The other port isn't USB3. It's a slower USB2 port. Again a limitation of the A18 Pro Processor. So, both can be used for power. If you need to hook up a fast peripheral, like a fast external drive or something, you probably want to put that on the back one for the USB3 speed and then plug into power on the front one for the USB2, you don't need speed for power. So, you've got those two. Of course you could hook up a hub up to either one of these depending upon what you need. So you could expand it more. You also get a headphone jack too. So you don't have to waste one of these if you just want to listen to music. You can plug into the headphone port. Of course, you can just do wireless headphones too with Bluetooth. 

Let's look at the Display here. The Display is a 13 inch display. So, Smaller than the MacBook Air. But it is a decent display. 500 nits of brightness. Again if you're working with photos and videos, you're already looking at MacBook Pros for that. This is for home users. You just need to be able to see normal computer stuff. It's' still a brilliant display compared to say what you would have gotten many years ago. So, you've got that. It's 2408 x 1506 pixels. Smaller than the MacBook Air again. So, you know Apple's cutback a little bit on this. But it's not too bad. You do get a camera built-in. It's a 1080p FaceTime Camera. So not the same really good cameras that are in the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro models. Apple's cutback on that with this cheaper model. But still a 1080p isn't bad. Notably there's no Notch. So the camera is there at the top and it works kind of like the older MacBooks from a few years ago before the Notch was introduced. It's probably cheaper for Apple to produce a display that doesn't have that Notch there at the top of the Camera coming through. 

Then for Audio you actually get two speakers, one on either side. So, it's stereo speakers and the two mic array as well. If you want better, you can certainly use AirPods or plug-in some headphones. It's actually capable of spatial audio with AirPods. So it is capable of that. You're just not going to get that from the little external speakers and stuff. 

The last place that Apple cut corners is battery power. So, it's got a significantly smaller battery than a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro does. It's only a 36.5 watt hour battery in it. So you're going to get less time out of this. If you're somebody that needs like extremely long battery life then you really want a MacBook Air, not this. However, if power is always available to you, when you only need an hour or two here and there on battery, then this should be more than fine. 

I think that's one of the main themes here is the fact that this is the low-end MacBook. If you look at it and say, well, all I can do is choose the lower one, the one with the 256 gig drive or the higher one with 512 and the Touch ID, you can't go any higher than that. You can't get more than the 8 gigs of RAM. You can't get a better processor. Well you can. It's called the MacBook Air. You just go up to that next level and get a MacBook Air. The upgrade is the MacBook Air. The upgrade above the MacBook Air is the MacBook Pro. So, it's not so much that you can't get a Neo with better specs. You can. It's just the next product up. I'm going to be really interested to see how this works in practice. I've ordered one. I'm fairly hopeful that I'll be able to demonstrate that it can do some decent amount of work. I've got an M2 MacBook Air now with only 8 gigs of RAM in it and 512 gigs in the drive and it handles things surprisingly well. I plan to do videos on that once I get it. If, like me, you want to jump on board and try to get one now, you can order it now. It's available for pre-order and should arrive on March 11th. I ordered one this morning and it says delivery March 11th and it should be in stores on that same day as well. 

Let me know what you think about the latest member of the Mac Family in the comments below. Thanks for watching.