#396  6th March 2026

Hello, Neo

Apple had told us to anticipate a "big week" and did they deliver!

iPhone 17e, iPad Air with M4, new(ish) Studio Displays, MacBook Air with M5, and MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max.

This alone would have made for a "big" week, but there was well, one new thing: The MacBook Neo.

New Mac product lines are rare. The last time we got a new Mac was the Mac Studio in 2022. The last new MacBook was the 12" MacBook in 2015. One could argue both the 12" MacBook and the Neo to be a continuation of the iBook/MacBook line. There are many similarities, especially to the iBook and it's introduction in 1999. But the 12" MacBook was a very different introduction, more similar to the 2008 MacBook Air.

While the rumor mills had been anticipating or spoiling a new low-end MacBook line for quite a while, the exact specs did turn out to be quite surprising. It comes with an A18 Pro chip. If you have concerns about this, the MacBook Neo is not for you. It'll be fine for the target audience.

There are other design choices Apple made to cut the price of the Neo. Stephen Hackett has a good list. But cut the price they did. US$599 entry price. $499 for education. Even the $699 price to bump the storage to a useful 512GB and add Touch-ID seem very muchapple.o worth it.

This is the lowest ever list price ever for an Mac notebook. It has generally (and approximately) been the case that for the price of a MacBook Pro (the "real" one, with the Pro chip), you can get a MacBook Air and an iMac or Mac mini with a good third party display.

Now, you can get a MacBook Neo and a brand new iPhone 17e for $100 more than the entry level MacBook Air. You can add a Mac mini, a decent third party display, and some Airpods Pro before you reach the price of the "real" MacBook Pro.

Another comparison is that you can get four MacBooks Neo at the education price for the education price of a 14" MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip. Five Neos for the 16".

(David points out that Apple sometimes just says "Neo" instead of "MacBook Neo" in their marketing material. I don't know what it means, but Apple marketing not using the full product name is… unprecedented.)

The fact that this entry level now exists for a Mac notebook is quite astounding. And it doesn't just exist, I expect the Neo to absolutely be a usable Mac. I know this because I used an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM for two years as my main driver and it was perfectly fine.

The specs of the Neo will be as good or better than the M1 Air. If you do any half-way silicon-intensive task professionally, you should upgrade to Air or Pro, that's why they exist. But many people do not need this, or not frequently enough to justify the expense.

My only disappointment is that it is neither lighter nor significantly smaller than the MacBook Air. But then, making things smaller and lighter often makes them more expensive. See: MacBook Air in 2008, 12" MacBook from 2015, and iPhone Air from 2025.

Even professionals who mainly do browsing and email and and do most of their work inside cloud services should be well-served with the MacBook Neo. They would have been well-served with an iPad Air with a Magic Keyboard, but the price of that combination is closer to a MacBook Air than the Neo.

Mac Admins are going to manage a lot of these, and not just in education.

Since the Apple silicon transition, the definition of "minimum professional Apple notebook" has moved from a base config 16" MacBook Pro to a 15" MacBook Air. MacBook Neo might continue this trend, maybe not right away, but this is likely not going to be the only generation.

On the other extreme of the performance spectrum, Apple introduced the Pro and Max version of the M5 chip generation this week. (Micheal Tsai's summary) This comes along with a confusing renaming of the core types. (Rocket Yard has a good explainer) Apple now seems to be using the "Fusion" architecture where they connect two dies with a high bandwidth connector. This has so far only appeared on the Ultra versions of the M-chips in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro but now seems to be used all the way down to the Max and Pro.

While this is undoubtedly exciting for the high-end MacBook Pro, it also puts a bit of a spotlight on the fact that no desktop Macs have received M5 updates yet. The Mac Studio Ultra is still on the M3 and the Mac Pro on the M2!

A Mac mini with M5 Pro will have quite the price/performance ratio.

Well, it's not that much longer until WWDC!