Review: The MacBook Neo Is the Perfect Set of Compromises

To make a Mac under $600, Apple made a series of very specific choices.

EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

Every product is a series of choices. It’s a series of compromises between what you wish a product might be and what it is in reality.

Sometimes, those choices are controversial. Take the MacBook Neo, for example, which Apple announced last week. It’s a 13-inch laptop that comes in at the same weight as a MacBook Air, though it’s slightly thicker. It’s powered by the A18 Pro processor from the iPhone 16 Pro, and includes 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. The only option you can choose is to increase the storage to 512GB, with which you also get a TouchID sensor.

Oh, and it’s $599, or—more importantly—$499 with an education discount. That is, by a significant margin, the least expensive laptop Apple has ever made.

Still, Apple’s newest Mac laptop in more than a decade is controversial, it seems. That’s not so much because of what it is, but because of what a lot of people wanted it to be. There is a vocal group of Apple customers who seem to have been hoping for a laptop smaller and lighter than a MacBook Air. Realistically, they were hoping for a return of the 12-inch MacBook, but with a real processor instead of whatever garbage mobile chip Intel was making at the time.

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A series of specific choices

That’s not this computer, and it isn’t the audience Apple was thinking about when it designed the MacBook Neo. Maybe Apple should make that laptop, but this is not it, and that’s okay. In fact, I think you can argue this was a much more important Mac for Apple. It’s a delightful entry-level laptop in a way only Apple can make.

To understand what I mean, it’s important to define who this laptop is for. If you own a Mac—any Mac, really—this is not the computer you should consider. I mean that. This isn’t supposed to be an upgrade from anything. I guess if you’re still using an older Intel MacBook Air, this will definitely perform significantly better, but if you like the MacBook Air, you should probably just buy another one of those.

If, on the other hand, you’ve never bought a Mac because you feel like they’re way too expensive for what you need a computer to do, the MacBook Neo was designed with you in mind.

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