MacBook Neo: 90% of the Laptop, 54% of the Price

Apple's new laptop is pure conceptual genius

When Tim Cook became Apple’s CEO in 2011, it took only nanoseconds for the second-guessing to begin.

“Without the creative genius of Steve Jobs, is Tim Cook capable of producing another unicorn product?” wrote CNN Money.

“Apple Unveils Panicked Man with No Ideas,” joked The Onion.

But in the 15 years since, Tim Cook has roughly quadrupled Apple’s profits, revenues, and stock price, and tripled its headcount.

He didn’t do it the way Jobs had—by releasing a series of grand-slam, world-changing products, like the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. (Cook’s Apple did make two swings for the fences—the Vision Pro and the self-driving Apple car. Both failed.) Instead, most of the company’s recent success has come from wringing more juice from the iPhone, with services (Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV) and accessories (Apple Watch, AirPods).

Which brings us to Apple’s new $600 laptop, the MacBook Neo ($500 with the educational discount). It’s not as revolutionary as the iPod or iPhone. But it shakes the earth in its own, stealthy way.

The Neo, described

One review describes the Neo like this: “It features 60GB/s memory bandwidth, which is less than half of the bandwidth of the MacBook Air. Like Apple’s other Macs, it has a Media Engine with hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW support, along with video encoding and decoding engines.”

If you know what that means, you’re probably not the target Neo customer.

Here is how I’d describe it:

From the moment you open the elegant, plastic-free packaging, you sense how much care, craft, and comfort Apple poured into this laptop. It’s made of Apple’s favorite material, cool and sleek to the touch: 100% recycled, anodized aluminum alloy. (60% of this machine is made from recycled materials.)

The Neo is lightweight, one-handable, and half an inch thick. You can open the lid with one finger; the finely engineered hinge freezes the screen angle whenever you stop. Bottom line: The Neo’s premium fit and finish humiliate $300 Chromebooks and $600 Windows notebooks, with their thick plastic cases, lower-res (and lower-brightness) screens, and gummy, uneven-clicking trackpads.

This machine comes in indigo, pink, silver, or yellow. The color infuses the entire thing, including the feet, the screws, the text highlight color, and the wallpaper. It’s silent and fanless; somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling.

You may not care about 60GB/s memory bandwidth. What you will care about are the parts you’ll be seeing and touching for hours a day: The superb keyboard, for example, and the super-crisp, bright screen. Its black border is thicker than on other Mac laptops—but there’s no gap (“notch”) at the top to conceal the camera.

Since 2015, Apple’s trackpads have only faked a click; a hidden motor underneath produces a sound and vibration, but the trackpad surface doesn’t actually move. But on the Neo, the trackpad actually clicks down, as on MacBooks of yore. It’s no better or worse than the fakeout trackpad; if this design helps save $500, I’m all for it.

This is a Mac laptop, so it’s instant-on, instant-off, like an inverted Close ‘n’ Play. As a result—and because it’s also light, quiet, sturdy, and long-lived (the battery gets 13.5 hours in the real world)—the Neo is iPad-like in its convenience. There’s no big startup/setup fuss when you want a quick email or social-media check. You can just pop into it while you’re waiting for the microwave to beep, the shower to get hot, or the dog to come back in.

The $500 difference

Until the Neo came along, the least expensive Apple laptop was the MacBook Air, which starts at $1100. So what accounts for the $500 price difference?

Here’s the list:

• The keyboard letters don’t light up in the dark.

• The side-firing stereo speakers aren’t as good. (They still sound better than the ones on $600 Windows laptops, though.)

• Two USB-C jacks instead of three. (Side effect: You can attach only one external monitor, not two.) And because you don’t get the MagSafe jack, the magnetic one that releases safely if someone walks into the cord, you have to use one of the USB-C jacks for charging.

• The $600 base model Neo has only 256 gigabytes of storage, half as much as the base MacBook Air. Then again, if most of what you work on is online and on iCloud, you may not care much about onboard file storage.

• The screen is slightly smaller than the MacBook Air’s (13 inches diagonal, versus 13.6), and so is its gamut (how many millions of color shades it can display).

• The base model has no fingerprint sensor, so you have to type in your password with every login and website. You can get that TouchID sensor—and twice as much storage—for another $100.

• 8 gigs of memory, tops. This stat ordinarily suggests that you can’t keep a lot of programs open at once. But on the Neo, Apple’s efficient memory-management system and fast SSD (its “hard drive”) shield you from most app-swapping pain. The Neo doesn’t even break a sweat with 10 or 15 programs open.

• The Neo comes with a tiny, 20-watt power brick, nearly as small as the iPhone’s; it doesn’t charge the laptop as fast as a bigger, higher-wattage brick. (In fact, you can use the iPhone’s charger to charge the Neo, which is cool.) But if you do own a higher-wattage brick, it’ll charge the Neo faster.

• You don’t get TrueTone, an Apple feature that adjusts the colors of the screen as the ambient room lighting changes.

• Only 60GB/s memory bandwidth. 😁

The most alarming sacrifice might seem to be the processor. All other Apple laptops contain M-series chips, the Apple-designed processors that offer astonishingly high speed and long battery life. Instead, the Neo runs on an A18 chip—the iPhone chip.

Last year’s iPhone chip, in fact.

You might assume that the result would be a slow laptop, impractical for editing photos or videos. But here’s the shock: It’s not slow. It’s zippy.

Here’s what it’s like editing 4K videos in Final Cut:

And here’s me flipping through 20 web tabs:

This thing feels fast doing everything most people do most of the time: email, web, social media, writing, messaging, spreadsheets, photo editing, presentations, notes, calendars and to dos, video calls, YouTube, streaming TV and movies, ebooks, livestreams, and even many games. (Here’s a playlist of popular games, showing how they run on the Neo.)

That’s not to say you’ll never tell the difference. In particular:

• Exporting a big edited video takes longer than on a MacBook Air.

• High frame-rate games bog down (Cyberpunk, for example).

This YouTuber conducted some excellent speed tests, pitting the Neo side-by-side against the Air. As you’ll see, when you’re not pitting the Neo side-by-side against the Air, you’ll rarely be aware that, yeah, you’re running on a phone chip.

The lesson of an iPhone chip inside the Neo, in other words, is not, “My god, the Neo is slow.” It’s, “My god, the iPhone is fast!”

The Neo concept

The Neo is a white-hot bestseller, and no wonder. First, it aces the spec that really counts: The price. You’re getting a whole laptop for less than the price of a phone.

Second, its concept is airtight and coherent: It’s the laptop for everybody but pros—the laptop for the rest of us, you might say. In that context, the features Apple has nipped away seem minor. You’re getting 90% of a MacBook Air for 54% of the price.

The Neo is a brilliant choice for students and teachers (who can get one for $500 instead of $600), and anyone who might want a starter MacBook, a second MacBook, a MacBook for the kitchen or the bedroom. Neos are so inexpensive and handy, techies are snapping them up for running risky development and AI environments, calling them “burner MacBooks.”

Last week, I appeared at New York City’s Cooper Union to talk about Apple’s past and future. It was part of my book tour for “Apple: The First 50 Years” (a New York Times bestseller—oh, did I forget to mention that?).

Joining me onstage were two brilliant, funny tech journalists: Lauren Goode, from Wired, and Joanna Stern, who just left the Wall Street Journal after 12 years.

They made two points I wished I’d made myself.

First, Lauren observed that Apple makes over $100 billion a year from services—Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud storage, and so on—for which the MacBook Neo acts as a low-cost on-ramp for a new generation of subscribers. In other words, those services let Apple sell a great laptop inexpensively.

Second—well, it is true that Tim Cook’s Apple hasn’t produced any Steve Jobs-like iDevices. “But the M-chip that came out in 2020 absolutely revolutionized the Mac business,” Joanna said. “And that is a Tim Cook innovation, a full-vertical-stack innovation that was pioneered by Cook and his team, that completely changed the Mac lineup. The innovation they’ve done in chips is another huge reason we’ve seen a lot of market success.”

And sure enough: The A18 chip’s low cost, high speed, long battery life, and tight integration with macOS are what make the Neo possible. If Apple hadn’t taken over its own chip-design destiny, there’d have been no Neo.

Sometimes, breakthrough innovation comes in on tiptoe.