MacBook Neo
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MacBook Neo
The Mac for everyone.
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| Official MacBook Neo site — Apple |
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[ Neo ]
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The MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever made — the $599 laptop ($499 for students) Apple shipped in March 2026 to fight Chromebooks and budget Windows machines on their own turf. Its trick is silicon economics: instead of an M-series chip it runs the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone-scale manufacturing turned into a full macOS computer.
1 Design and hardware✎
The Neo is a 13-inch aluminum laptop in four colors — silver, indigo, blush, and citrus — with a 2408×1506 Liquid Retina display at 500 nits. The price shows in the margins, not the build: 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage at the base, two USB-C ports of unequal speed (one 10 Gbps with DisplayPort, one USB 2.0), a single external-display limit, USB-C charging with no MagSafe, and Touch ID reserved for the 512 GB model, whose base sibling makes do with a plain lock button. The 36.5-watt-hour battery still clears a full workday.
2 Reception✎
Reviews landed on the same verdict: nothing in the price class touches its build, display, or speakers, and the compromises are honest ones. It sold accordingly — analysts called it a sensation, and its launch quarter made it the story of 2026's Mac lineup, pulling first-time buyers into macOS the way the iPod once fed the Mac.
3 Position✎
The Neo rewrites the lineup's floor: MacBook Air moved upmarket, Chromebooks lost their price moat, and Apple gained an education play it had ceded for a decade. It is also a silicon statement — the first Mac on an A-series chip, proof the iPhone's processor can carry a laptop when the price demands it.