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The MacBook Neo was just announced. A cheap MacBook that only Apple could have pulled off. So, some background. For the past year or so, every computer laptop company that I've interacted with, so like any of the major players and like the chip manufacturers, they've all at one point or another asked me the question like, "Hey Dave, do you know anything about this budget MacBook that's supposed to be coming out?" And obviously, I didn't know anything, but and they never outright said it, but it always felt like they were worried. Worried that the existence of an inexpensive MacBook would be so disruptive to the laptop industry that they were trying to get some kind of information so they could plan around
it. And it's finally here. An entry-level MacBook aimed at students or like first-time Mac buyers who are trying to spend as little as possible. So, the sticker price is $599 US for the base model and there's an educational discount that brings it down to $499. And I imagine many, if not most of the kind of prospective buyers, would be able to obtain that discount. There's also a higher-tier version that has Touch ID on the keyboard and more storage. Now, the most surprising thing about this product to me, aside from its price, is that it's an aluminum laptop.
It's the same weight as the MacBook Air, 1.23 kilos, and it comes in four colorways that called blush, indigo, silver, and citrus. But, laptops in this price range are almost always plastic. Now, my first reaction was like, "This is awesome. A metal laptop is always is better than a plastic laptop, right?" They're more durable. And my kids' Chromebook at school, he had this thing for like 2 months when I had to tape it up because it cracked at the hinge. There was even a Reddit post recently where an IT guy at a school system was like just blown away by the number of busted plastic Chromebooks. But, on the flip side, aluminum dents and scratches
really easily. Like, this is a I mean, this is a 12-in MacBook, but this was like a very small drop. And like when this happened, I was so disappointed because it's like, right? This is a really expensive machine that if this was plastic, nothing would have happened to it. I don't even think it would have cracked. It would have just been like it would hit the ground and like, "Okay, that sucks." But this dent and it's permanent. You can't like hammer that out. You have to I don't know. You can't even fix it without just replacing the whole frame. So, as beautiful as these colorful metal MacBooks are, I imagine if these products go into a school system with a lot of young kids, there's
be so many dented MacBook Neos in the future. Now, in terms of what you get inside, we have 8 gigs of RAM and 256 to 512 gigs of storage. You get the A18 Pro chip. You get a 60 Hz 13-in IPS display. They call it Liquid Retina still. It gets good brightness and good resolution, but I imagine the color accuracy won't be all that good. I will measure it in my upcoming review. The two USB-C ports are not Thunderbolt, but you can connect a 4K 60 external display to the left one. The battery's 36.5 W hours. It's not a like physically large battery, but the battery life seems quite good. They're quoting just a few hours shorter than the MacBook Air. I
will test this for sure. Uh it comes with a 20 W charger and there's no MagSafe. So, if you are juicing up your device, you only get one USB-C port that you can plug up peripherals to. It still has the classic MacBook keyboard with their haptic trackpad. The keyboard does not have backlighting and the trackpad doesn't have force touch capabilities. And there's also no True Tone. So, uh because there's no ambient light sensor in this thing, the tech where like it kind of measures the color temperature of your room and then adjusts the color temperature of your screen to match, that is not available on the MacBook Neo. So, the chip is the A18 Pro chip, which was the chip in the iPhone 16 Pro
devices. But this chip, if you compare to like M1 devices, like the original M1 Apple silicon, this is very similar at multi-core, but noticeably faster than the M1 chip at single-core. And single-threaded performance is the stuff that regular laptop tasks lean on. So, I really think this will be a great performer for the vast majority of users. The RAM being capped at just 8 GB is going to be the limiting factor for a lot of people. I will be testing that extensively in my review, but the one thing I will say that was good that came from just the 8 gig limit is that we saw almost no AI marketing in that whole like launch. If you think about this industry, the laptop industry, I can't
think of any recent laptop that has come out that hasn't just leaned super aggressively into like AI maxing your life. It is just like it's overwhelming, but this was just like, "Hey, you can use Apple Intelligence to like remove things in your photos that clean up photos. And also, this device can use Chat GPT." And that's it. Ultimately though, for the MacBook Neo, Apple has to strip out enough features so that they can create some kind of like product segmentation, right? So that there's like a inexpensive budget product like this, but at the same time for the MacBook Air, they still have to make that thing a compelling purchase that like you can justify the $500 price bump to pick up a MacBook Air. And so,
they have like, you know, the 8 gig limit for the RAM, the storage limits, the lack of keyboard backlighting, like little quality of life features that aren't super important for most people, but you just want them. So you're like, "Ah, maybe I got to pay up for that MacBook Air." But I think for I think this is a thought before testing it. I think the MacBook Neo is going to satisfy the computer or laptop needs for like almost everybody. It's just like a It's just such a great computer in terms of what it's capable of, but it's missing a lot of little features that make computing a little bit nicer. I do think that this product will be very disruptive to the industry. Like if you
think of the younger generation of students or kids that have access to something like this at an early age, they may grow to like it and they grow to prefer the operating system, which ends up, you know, down the line when they're capable of buy their own laptop, I can see people might prefer macOS at that point in time. Like the price point is so good and just so powerful at swaying a purchase decision, right? Ultimately, that's why a lot of people buy things. It's like it's a good price, and this is a very good price. And I think Apple is the only company in the world that could have pulled this off.
Like only Apple has access to such a inexpensive but also very capable chip, the A18 Pro. But more importantly, only Apple has control of the full stack because they control the operating system and write the operating system. They have the ability to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of that chip. No other company, like if you grab two like a chip company and a operating system company and made them do this, like it would never come out the same way. This is the only company that could have pulled this off. So, I think this is going to be super disruptive to the industry. I'm excited to see it. I'm also super excited to see how the industry responds to this because now you have a threat. Your
entire like entry-level product line is at risk. Okay, what do you think of this device? Are any of you guys going to pick this up?
