The MacBook Neo is a laptop built for a different era
This week, Apple announced the MacBook Neo. The headline features sound viable: it’s small, light, colourful, and available from £599 – a fraction of the cost of the next-in-line MacBook Air (£1,099). On the face of it, it seems like a solid entry-level option for those without the budget to go up-range.
Then you look at the specs. The Neo has an A18 Pro processor, matching that of the iPhone 16 Pro Max. While that sounds concerning, benchmarking suggests it could outperform the M1 chip used in older MacBooks.1 It won’t challenge the current M5, but this isn’t a laptop aimed at power users.
More limiting is the RAM. The MacBook Air isn’t even offered with anything less than 16GB of memory, but the Neo is locked in at 8GB. In the modern world of computing – even on the relatively resource-efficient macOS – that doesn’t feel like enough for anything beyond the most basic web browsing and video playback, and could get congested as the system ages, the user installs more apps, and software continues to become more bloated.
Who is the Neo for?
The more I think about it, the more the MacBook Neo feels like a laptop built for another era. It won’t interest users who do anything remotely intensive with their laptops – coding, video processing, gaming, and so on – which leaves it at the lower-end, “casual” portion of the productivity market.
But it’s debateable whether those users need a laptop anymore. Phones and tablets are much more capable these days. Apple even pitches the iPad as a laptop replacement now. If your computing consists of email, YouTube, and social media, then an iPhone could be enough – it certainly is for my wife, who does everything on her phone and hasn’t touched her laptop in years.
It's debateable whether the casual users who would have bought the MacBook Neo a decade ago even need a laptop anymore.
Maybe Apple had business or education in mind. If the initial reviews are good enough then it could tempt some organisations or students to buy Neos. If all you need to do is reply to emails and write a report or essay now and again, it might be a viable system. But those segments – and especially students – are cost-conscious, and some lightweight Windows laptops are less than half the price. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for the Apple brand.
For now, the MacBook Neo feels like a misstep. I don’t doubt that there is a market for a more budget-friendly MacBook, but it needs internals that will stand the test of time in the era of software bloat. With the Neo, Apple has limited its audience to a group for whom a laptop is less important than ever before. It’s hard to imagine users like my wife splashing out on a laptop that they’ll barely use – and one that may struggle to keep up in a few years.
Notes and references
- While the functionality of the processor might not be a concern, it will be interesting to see how the psychology plays out. The kind of person who would check out the processor specs is also likely the kind of person who would be put off by a mobile processor in a laptop – and not everyone will look for the benchmarking against Apple’s M series processors.