Apple Announces All-New MacBook Neo
Apple on Wednesday announced the star of the week’s bonanza: the MacBook Neo.
The newest member of the Mac family is a “budget,” $599 computer powered by an A18 Pro chip, the very same silicon which powered the flagship iPhone 16 Pro in 2024. MacBook Neo comes in four colors—blue, pink, silver, and yellow—and weighs 2.7 pounds. The display is a 13” Liquid Retina display, replete with 2408×1506 resolution and 500 nits of brightness. In terms of biometrics, Touch ID is a “premium” add-on available only on the $699 version which doubles disk storage from the base 256GB to 512GB. RAM-wise, MacBook Neo ships with 8GB and only 8GB (the Air starts at 16GB).
“We’re incredibly excited to introduce MacBook Neo, which delivers the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price,” John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, said in a statement for the press release. “Built from the ground up to be more affordable for even more people, MacBook Neo is a laptop only Apple could create. It features a durable aluminum design in four beautiful colors; a brilliant Liquid Retina display; Apple silicon-powered performance; all-day battery life; a high-quality camera, mics, and speakers; a Magic Keyboard and Multi-Touch trackpad; and the intuitive and powerful features of macOS. There is simply no other laptop like it.”
I was not in New York City today for Apple’s hands-on media “experience”—I wasn’t invited this time, but not upset about it one iota given my personal tumult over the last few weeks—but from what I can glean from the company’s website, I think the MacBook Neo is a winner and should prove popular. I’ve gone on the record numerous times in the past about how the Walmart M1 MacBook Air is a tremendous value for budget-conscious buyers—and make no mistake, the majority of disabled people sit firmly in that category—but the MacBook Neo strikes me as, perhaps paradoxically, a premium evolution of the old M1 Air. The Neo has the modern design language of the M5 MacBook Air and Pros, comes in fun colors, and has a high value proposition. Apple obviously left out some stuff in order to meet a price (more on that in a minute), but on the whole, it’s good to see Apple addressing the entry-level market with all the premium panache they can muster whilst retaining the profit margins they adore.
From an accessibility perspective, the MacBook Neo’s (understandable) omissions become much more pronounced for prospective buyers, notably…
No MagSafe
No backlit keyboard
No Force Touch on the trackpad
No Touch ID (unless you pay up)
Of these four, I’d posit the lack of MagSafe is a backbreaker. Most people, including the journalists at the aforementioned press event, like to say MagSafe is a nicety—an amenity, like getting free breakfast with your stay at Hampton Inn. In a vacuum, MagSafe is an amenity—but it also can be a bonafide necessity. If you, like yours truly, copes with visual and motor conditions which make for lackluster hand-eye coordination, MagSafe on a MacBook Air (or an iPhone, for that matter) suddenly becomes a de-facto accessibility feature. As I’ve written, USB-C ports like on the MacBook Neo may well be ubiquitous and preferred for its One Cable To Rule Them All standardization, a cogent argument could be made that USB-C is terrible for literal usability. Inserting and removing a cable—necessary on MacBook Neo to charge the battery—on one of the USB-C ports isn’t for the faint of fine-motor skills. It takes a relatively good amount of precision and force to make sure the job is done correctly; by contrast, MagSafe removes said friction because physics does all the heavy lifting. That isn’t trivial if, say, your MacBook Neo is about dead and you really need to turn in that term paper by the due date or file that story by deadline. What I’m saying is, knowing MagSafe is there has the added benefit of lessening lots of cognitive load.
In a similar vein, that one must spend another Ben Franklin to get Touch ID may be well worth the cost because the technology makes logging in to the machine, using Apple Pay on the web, and more eminently better experiences, accessibility-wise. You needn’t have to manually type in your admin password to get into your Mac every time, for instance. At a macro level, if you’re a disabled person who needs or wants all the things the MacBook Neo lacks, then it’s probably not for you. It’s better to get the base M5 MacBook Air with the understanding you’re gonna pay more ($1099) to get more.
Personally, I’m highly intrigued by the MacBook Neo. Although my M2 MacBook Air is ostensibly better, what with its three times more RAM and MagSafe port in effectively the same body, a part of me wonders if the Neo would be good enough as a “coffee shop Mac”—something modest yet powerful that would suffice for working on stories like this one, but not as fancy as the M2 Pro MacBook Pro that powers my desk setup. At the very least, I think the silver Neo with the white keys looks clean as hell, and I’d be damned proud to carry it with me in my messenger bag to and fro said coffee shop.
Maybe Apple will send me a review unit? The MacBook Neo sure seems compelling.
