Originally published at: The MacBook Neo’s Carefully Considered Compromises - TidBITS
“The notebook reinvented,” Apple trumpeted in a 2015 press release when it announced the 12-inch MacBook meant to complement existing MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines. But the MacBook was dragged down by a paucity of ports, the problematic butterfly keyboard, mediocre battery life, and its $1299 price, which compared poorly to the $899 11-inch MacBook Air and $999 13-inch MacBook Air. In 2019, after four years and two updates, Apple would discontinue the 12-inch MacBook, two years after the 11-inch MacBook Air ended its six-year run. Since then, the 13-inch MacBook Air has been the most popular Apple laptop.
Now, Apple is taking another swing at expanding its laptop line with the MacBook Neo, an inexpensive, colorful laptop that will prove popular with K–12 students and budget-conscious adults whose basic computing habits don’t need the power of even the MacBook Air. It’s available for pre-order now in four colors—silver, blush, citrus, and indigo—with availability on 11 March 2026.
Unlike the 12-inch MacBook, the MacBook Neo isn’t a testbed for new designs and technologies. If anything, it’s the reverse, with Apple falling back on older, slower technologies like the A18 Pro, USB 2, and the Multi-Touch trackpad.
Nor, like the 11-inch MacBook Air, is it offering a significantly smaller and lighter package. Although it’s a tiny bit narrower and shallower than the MacBook Air, it’s essentially the same size and weight (2.7 pounds or 1.23 kg). The aluminum-bodied industrial design is also basically the same, with the rounded corners that replaced the MacBook Air’s wedge-shaped design several years ago.
Instead, the MacBook Neo is Apple’s attempt to bring the cost down with compromises that, the company hopes, will not significantly detract from the Mac experience for its target audience. And bring the cost down it has. The MacBook Neo comes in two configurations: one priced at $599 for 256 GB of storage, and the other at $699 for 512 GB of storage with a Touch ID sensor on the keyboard.
Contrast that with the M1 MacBook Air that Walmart has been selling for $699 for the past two years (see “Walmart Sells M1 MacBook Air for $699,” 15 March 2024). Even better is the MacBook Neo’s educational discount that lowers the starting price to $499—no Mac laptop has ever been so targeted at K–12 students. This pricing positions the Neo to compete with the low-cost Windows notebooks and Chromebooks prevalent in the education market.
That $599 price also puts the MacBook Neo in a completely different ballpark than the M5 MacBook Air, which now starts at $1099 with 512 GB of storage (see “MacBook Air Gets M5, MacBook Pro Gains M5 Pro and M5 Max,” 3 March 2026). Although Apple nominally kept the MacBook Air’s price the same, it did so by eliminating the 256 GB configuration that sold for $999. All the better to throw a light on the MacBook Neo’s low price.
Rounding Corners
So how did Apple get the price down to $599? The company didn’t so much cut corners as round them off to reduce costs. The MacBook Neo is still a Mac, and as far as we can tell without extensive testing, it looks, walks, and quacks like a Mac.
Processor, Memory, and Storage
The most notable change in the MacBook Neo is the A18 Pro chip, which was used in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple has never before used an iPhone-class chip in a Mac, but the company has regularly touted the A-series chips as having “desktop-class CPU” and “pro-class GPU” performance. We also know that the M-series chips are direct descendants of the A-series. So it’s not entirely surprising that Apple felt the A18 Pro would be up to the task. It even supports Apple Intelligence, should that ever become important.
Interestingly, the A18 Pro isn’t much cheaper than the base M-series chips, with industry estimates putting its cost at roughly the same $40–$50. However, for the MacBook Neo’s target audience, a lot of subsystems like Thunderbolt controllers, multiple external displays, larger unified memory footprints, and higher memory bandwidth aren’t necessary. Dropping back to an iPhone-class chip lets Apple build a simpler, more power-efficient system that can run from a smaller battery and stay cool without a fan.
Particularly given how the AI industry has driven up memory and storage costs, Apple’s decision to limit the MacBook Neo to 8 GB of unified memory makes sense. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro now start at 16 GB and offer additional memory in build-to-order configurations. But 8 GB was enough for the MacBook Air for several years, and Apple undoubtedly believes that the less-demanding MacBook Neo audience won’t notice.
As noted above, the MacBook Neo offers only two storage tiers: 256 GB and 512 GB. As with previous models of the MacBook Air, 256 GB may feel tight, particularly for someone who takes a lot of photos or plays games with large disk footprints, but it’s certainly workable. There are always external SSDs for increasing storage.
Display and Camera
A larger share of the cost savings probably comes from the display. The MacBook Neo sports a 13.0-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and support for 1 billion colors. Apple claims the display is both brighter and higher-resolution than most PC laptops in this price range, and that’s probably true—inexpensive PC displays are often terrible. The MacBook Neo also comes with an anti-reflective coating that should help with viewability in variable lighting conditions.
However, compared to the MacBook Air’s 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display and 2560-by-1664 native resolution, Apple is undoubtedly saving a bunch. The MacBook Neo gives up some screen real estate, and it lacks True Tone, which adjusts the display for ambient light conditions. Although both screens support 1 billion colors, the MacBook Neo supports only sRGB color rather than the MacBook Air’s Wide P3 color, making colors slightly less vivid when viewing photos or videos. However, most people won’t notice these differences unless they compare laptops side by side.
Another big compromise comes with the MacBook Neo’s 1080p FaceTime camera. In all other models, Apple has standardized on the 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with support for Desk View. Video calls will be lower quality than on the MacBook Air, and there’s no Desk View, but both seem like reasonable compromises to reduce component costs.
Connectivity and Charging
In a move reminiscent of the 12-inch MacBook, Apple chose to limit the MacBook Neo’s ports. It does have two USB-C ports, but they’re strange. The left one supports USB 3 with speeds up to 10 Gb/s, but the right one only supports USB 2 at 480 Mb/s. In contrast, the MacBook Air offers two Thunderbolt 4 ports that each offer 40 Gb/s.
The practical upshot of this split is that only the left port can drive an external display, and only a single 4K display at that—not one of Apple’s Studio Displays, but they’re likely too expensive for the audience anyway. It would also be appropriate for an external storage drive. The right port would be useful for a keyboard, mouse, or other low-bandwidth accessory. macOS warns you if you try to connect a display to the USB 2 port. Luckily, both ports can be used for charging since there’s no MagSafe charging port, another cost-cutting move.
Speaking of charging, the MacBook Neo has a significantly smaller battery than the MacBook Air—36.5 watt-hours versus 53.8 watt‑hours. The smaller battery won’t yield much cost savings, but its reduced weight may be necessary to offset other components that cost less but weigh more.
Nevertheless, Apple rates the MacBook Neo at 16 hours of battery life for “video streaming” and 11 hours of “wireless web.” Those are sufficient for Apple to claim “all-day” battery life, even if they don’t match up to the MacBook Air’s 18 and 15 hours, respectively.
The MacBook Neo comes with a 20W charger, which is undoubtedly cheaper than the MacBook Air’s 40W dynamic power adapter with a max output of 60W.
In terms of wireless connectivity, the MacBook Neo supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6. Although the MacBook Air supports Wi-Fi 7, few people have the necessary base stations, and no one in the target audience will notice the difference.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Other component compromises that contribute to cost savings include the Magic Keyboard and Multi-Touch trackpad. The Magic Keyboard is probably the same one as in the MacBook Air—it looks the same—except that it has no backlighting, and the base model lacks Touch ID.
More significant is the trackpad. Instead of the Force Touch trackpad introduced with the 12-inch MacBook that relies on pressure sensors and a haptic click simulation, Apple advertises the MacBook Neo as using a Multi-Touch trackpad. If that’s the same trackpad as before, it has a physical click mechanism that doesn’t work as well at the edges and is more likely to fail. However, it’s undoubtedly cheaper and still supports multi-finger gestures. It doesn’t support the Force Touch features like deep pressing a file in the Finder to open it in Quick Look, but we doubt many people use them.
Mics and Speakers
Finally, the MacBook Neo has a dual-mic array with directional beamforming and a side-firing dual-speaker system. We’re sure it sounds fine, but on paper, at least, it’s not up to the level of the MacBook Air, which has a three-mic array with directional beamforming and a four-speaker system. Both have 3.5 mm headphone jacks, though the MacBook Air claims it has “advanced support for high‑impedance headphones.”
Realistically, we expect many MacBook Neo users to be using AirPods at all times anyway.
Who Is the MacBook Neo For?
Let’s face it. Most TidBITS readers aren’t the target audience for the MacBook Neo. We’re accustomed to using Macs where Apple hasn’t made numerous compromises, and we’d notice the little things.
By targeting low-end Windows laptops and Chromebooks, Apple is taking aim at the education market, specifically K–12 students. These days, all middle- and high-schoolers need laptops, and Apple may be losing a bunch of sales later in life to people who were issued a Windows laptop in school and stuck with it.
A MacBook Neo is perfectly adequate for writing short papers in Pages, creating presentations in Keynote, analyzing science lab data in Numbers, browsing the Web in Safari, keeping up with email in Mail, and chatting with friends in Messages. Oddly, Apple also said that AI tools like ChatGPT and Canva run beautifully on the MacBook Neo, a self-serving claim given that both are cloud-based services that don’t require local processing.
However, the MacBook Neo isn’t appropriate for all students. We’d recommend that college-bound students stick with the MacBook Air, even if they don’t anticipate needing its full power. It’s hard to predict what might be necessary during college, and a student may find themselves wanting to edit video, produce music, run stats apps, and more. Plus, college students are more likely to feel constrained by the MacBook Neo’s minimal ports compared to the MacBook Air’s pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports and MagSafe charging. Don’t discount the safety factor of the quick-release MagSafe over USB-C when on-the-go students are constantly plugging and unplugging.
Similarly, most business and creative professionals may run into the MacBook Neo’s limitations. In particular, it simply doesn’t have the performance or connectivity that creatives need. However, it may be a fine travel laptop for someone who has a Mac mini or Mac Studio at the office. It’s sufficient for keeping up with email, managing travel details on websites, and giving presentations.
Even if the MacBook Neo isn’t the Mac that most of us have been waiting for, it looks like an excellent addition to the MacBook lineup that makes numerous carefully considered compromises in the service of becoming Apple’s most affordable laptop ever.
