After years of rumors, Apple has finally taken the wraps off its new entry-level notebook. In some ways, the MacBook Neo is exactly what we expected, but in others, it’s not. I’ve been excited about this rumor for a long time, since it’s been a while Apple has done anything new and unusual in the Mac line.

The Neo certainly checks both of those boxes.

What’s in a Name?

I think everyone was betting the company would use the “MacBook” name for a third time, but instead we’ve all got to contend with “MacBook Neo.” I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either, and I assume it will fade into the background like many other of Apple’s weird product names.¹

Sorry, Lovers of Tiny Laptops

The MacBook Neo is no 12-inch PowerBook G4 or 11-inch MacBook Air, but its 13-inch display is smaller than the current entry-level MacBook Air, which sports a 13.6-inch screen.

However, size is about more than screen real estate, and that’s where things get a bit weird:

Model:	Weight:	Thickness:	Width:	Depth:
Neo	2.7 pounds	.50 inch	11.71 inches	8.12 inches
13-inch Air	2.7 pounds	.44 inch	11.97 inches	8.46 inches

In short, the MacBook Neo is slightly thicker than the MacBook Air, but will take up slightly less space on a desk. In a bag, it’s gonna feel exactly the same.

I know there are folks who desire a truly tiny MacBook, but for this machine, I think a 13-inch display is about right. The Neo is going to be used in schools, by college students, and by other budget-sensitive consumers. While some nerds see a smaller screen as a desirable feature, many would consider it a penalty of buying a cheaper product.

iPhone Inside

Inside, the MacBook Neo is powered by an A18 Pro with a 6‑core CPU (2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) and 8 GB of RAM. It has a 5-core GPU, down a core from the A18 Pro that was in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.

There are no options in terms of additional cores or unified memory. In fact, these are the only options when ordering:

• 256 GB SSD without Touch ID
• 512 GB SSD with Touch ID for $100 more

The 8 GB of unified memory is a limitation of the A18 Pro. I assume future versions of the MacBook Neo will have more RAM; the A19 Pro comes with 12 GB.

I suspect some buyers will jump to the MacBook Air just for more RAM, and I think Apple is more than fine with that.

Apple’s chip choice here shows just how far Apple silicon has come in recent years. A SoC designed for a phone is enough to power a full-blown macOS computer. We’ve known this to be the case based on Geekbench scores for a while, as Jason Snell wrote last year:

The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today, its performance characteristics make it perfectly suitable as a low-cost Mac laptop, building a new model on the A18 Pro would not be a bad move.

Seeing this come to fruition is exciting, and I suspect this machine will be plenty fast for years to come.

Of course, numbers like this have caused pain for fans of a certain Mac model, including John Siracusa:

The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo is 19% faster than the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro in single-core performance (Geekbench 6).

The MacBook Neo starts at $599.

The Mac Pro, which is still for sale, starts at $6,999.

Will the MacBook Neo be powerful enough for everyone? Absolutely not. But will it be powerful for million and millions of macOS users? Absolutely.

That’s not say the Neo doesn’t come with a serious list of compromises. To hit the price point, Apple had to make some hard choices.

For the most part, I think the cuts it made make sense, even if the lack of a backlit keyboard hurts me in a way I find it hard to describe.

Pricing & Positioning

I love the giant price gap between the Neo and the Air.

It means Apple has not repeated the mistakes of the past. The 12-inch MacBook cost $1299 when it debuted back in 2015. The 13-inch MacBook Air could be picked up for $999 for a better CPU, less storage, and with a much worse screen. Then, in 2016, the two-port MacBook Pro showed up and really muddied the waters at $1499.

It was a mess, and I spent hours of my life complaining about it on podcasts.

The price not only separates this machine from the Air, but it also speaks to how consumers should think about this machine. It has (many) fewer features, a (slightly) smaller display, and a (somewhat) less-powerful processor than the Air, which is then a rung below the MacBook Pro. Everything is nice and neat.

Instead of thinking about the MacBook Neo in the framework of the old 12-inch MacBook, I think it’s more useful to think about it in relation to the old M1 MacBook Air. Quinn Nelson said it well:

The MacBook Neo is basically the Walmart M1 MacBook Air. But new and colorful.

Their specs are a bit different: Neo has a better webcam, display, CPU/NPU. M1 Air had a better GPU, battery, a Force Touch trackpad.

Both had 8GB memory.

Both had 256GB storage.

Both were $599.

This is a Mac made for the masses, not the power user, which is very exciting. Just look at how hard Apple pushes the integration between the Mac and the iPhone on the Neo’s various product pages.

Colors!

I cannot believe it’s taken 900 words to get to the colors the MacBook Neo comes in:

From left to right, Apple calls these colors Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. I think the Citrus and Indigo are fun options, and I suspect Blush will sell very well.

I am disappointed that they are not as vibrant or wide-ranging as the colors found on the iMac:

Then there’s the colors found on other Apple products. I mean, Cosmic Orange IS RIGHT THERE, APPLE. COME ON.

I would love to see Apple turn these colors over annually like they do with the iPhone. The Neo should be super responsive to fashionable colors. Even though I wanted more, I will say a nice touch is the color-matched keyboard, seen here in Blush:

I Ordered One

For the last several years, my only Mac has been a 14-inch MacBook Pro, used with an external display at my desk. If I want to work elsewhere, I can eject a couple of drives, grab my laptop, and be on my way. It’s great

However, there are times when I need a Mac, but do not want my expensive MacBook Pro with all of my work data on it. I often want to just do some browsing downstairs after work or take a laptop to a meeting at church or at one of my kids’ school.

A couple of years ago, I bought an entry-level M3 MacBook Air for running — and taking screenshots of — beta versions of macOS during the summer. Over the last six months or so, it’s also become the laptop I use outside of work.

I’ve ordered a Citrus model with the 512 GB SSD and Touch ID to slot into this space in my life, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it next week. If it goes well, the M3 Air will go to a family member in need of an upgrade. If not, I’ll still be happy to spend time with — and review! — the most interesting new Mac in years.

With a price point of $599 (or $499 for students!) Apple had to make some cuts when designing the MacBook Neo.

Here’s a list of what separates the MacBook Neo from the $1099 MacBook Air, besides their sizes:

• Only supports 8 GB of unified memory
• No MagSafe
• One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s
• No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.
• “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air
• Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color
• No True Tone
• No ambient light sensor
• 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage
• No camera notch
• Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air
• Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods
• Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air
• The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones
• No keyboard backlighting
• Touch ID not included on base model
• Trackpad does not support Force Touch
• Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7
• No fast charging
• The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny (Thanks, Jason!)

When I look at that list, the price difference between the Neo and the Air makes a lot more sense. My guess is that most folks in the market for a $599 Mac won’t care about most of these. (For goodness sake, the education price of this machine is HALF THAT of the MacBook Air!)

That said, if I could add two things back in, I’d choose keyboard backlighting and fast charging.

As far as an option for more unified memory, things are trickier. 8 GB is a limitation of the A18 Pro. I assume future versions of the MacBook Neo will have more RAM; the A19 Pro comes with 12 GB.

It’s a big day for Mac laptop buyers. Let’s start with the simplest of the updates, the MacBook Air:

M5 features a faster CPU and next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling MacBook Air to power through a variety of workflows, from creative projects to complex AI tasks. MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless connectivity on the go.

The new MacBook Air starts with 512 GB of storage, which is up from the M4’s 256 GB entry point, and can be upgraded to a full 4 TB for the first time. Apple says the SSD is twice as fast as before. The Air features the same great chassis — and colors — as before, and now starts at $1,099, a hundred bucks more than before, thanks to that bump in SSD size.

Moving upstream, things get much more interesting with two new chips: the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

These use a new design Apple is calling its “Fusion Architecture,” as the press release explains:

This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.

[…]

This brings together two third-generation 3-nanometer dies with high bandwidth and low latency using advanced packaging. The two dies include a powerful new CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.

With this new chiplet design comes a new silly Apple marketing move:

M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 all-new performance cores.

The industry-leading super core was first introduced as performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for all M5-based products — MacBook Air, the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. This core is the highest-performance core design with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, driven in part by increased front-end bandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.

There three levels of cores now, as John Gruber writes:

There are now three core types in M5-series CPUs. Efficiency cores are still “efficiency”, but they’re only in the base M5. What used to be called “performance” cores are now called “super” cores, and they’re present in all M5 chips. The new core type — more power-efficient than super cores, more performant than efficiency cores — are taking the old name “performance”.

He’s put them in chart form:

Chip:	Efficiency:	Performance:	Super:
M5	6 cores	—	4 cores
M5 Pro	—	10 cores	5 cores
M5 Pro	—	12 cores	6 cores
M5 Max	—	12 cores	6 cores

My word.

All M5 Pro and Max systems come with:

• A faster 16-core Neural Engine
• Support for hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC, AV1 decode, and ProRes encode and decode engines
• Memory Integrity Enforcement, which Apple describes in this security research blog post
• A Thunderbolt 5 setup that includes a custom-designed controller for each port

The MacBook Pro itself still comes in 14- and 16-inch sizes. The smaller machine can be purchased with an M5, M5 Pro, or M5 Max, while the 16-inch can only be ordered with the latter two options.

The M5 Pro starts with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU variant, 24 GB of unified memory, and a 1 TB SSD.

The M5 Max can be topped out with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU with 128 GB of unified memory, and an 8 TB SSD.

These machines are available in the previous silver and space black finishes, and ship next week.

Yesterday, Jason shared the results of his annual Apple report card. As per tradition, I’m now turning the answers I supplied Jason into a blog post.¹

Mac: 4/5

Five years into the Apple silicon era, Apple seems to be firing on all cylinders, with regular releases for most of its products (cough, cough, Mac Pro). The laptops run cool with amazing battery life, and there’s a desktop Mac for just about everyone.

Apple’s external displays continue to age, rather ungracefully. Mac users shopping for a display have more options than ever beyond the Apple Store. The Studio Display is too expensive, and the XDR is just … well, there’s a lot going on there. I hope Apple has some new products ready sooner rather than later.

macOS Tahoe is Apple’s weakest implementation of Liquid Glass. Buttons don’t look like buttons, window corners cut off content, and the locking of icons into Squircle Jail is a crime. I like a lot about Liquid Glass on the iPhone, but I fear that Tahoe was either an afterthought or redesigned by folks who don’t know what makes macOS special. I’m running Tahoe, and while it doesn’t get in my way very often, there are little bits of friction everywhere, like grains of sand scratching and pitting the windshield of a passing car.

The iPhone: 4/5

2025 brought more iPhones than ever, as Apple leaned into differentiation between models. The iPhone Pro and Pro Max were redesigned to maximize the performance of the camera and the silicon inside. The iPhone 17 gained ProMotion and the always-on display, making it the best base iPhone ever.

Then there’s the iPhone Air. Its compromises aren’t for everyone, but if it fits into your life, it’ll slide into your pocket better than any other iPhone.

Liquid Glass feels the most complete on iOS 26, but it is far from perfect. The price paid for content reflecting and refracting under UI elements includes legibility issues and performance concerns. I don’t have the hatred for Liquid Glass that some do, but it’s clear that Apple has more work to do to make this interface serve all of its users well.

The iPad: 4/5

After years of dragging its feet, Apple finally did the thing and gave iPadOS a full-blown windowing system. Split View, Slide Over, and Stage Manager were all attempts that still (mostly) exist, but iPadOS 26 is the real deal. Paired with a keyboard and trackpad, an iPad feels more desktop-like than ever, yet the classic one-app-at-a-time interface is still alive and well for folks who prefer a simpler experience.

Hardware-wise, Apple continues to offer a wide range of devices at a wide range of price points. There’s an iPad for everyone, and that’s a good thing.

Apple Watch: 3/5

After skipping the Apple Watch Ultra 2, I upgraded my original Ultra to the 3 this time around … but I’m not sure I could tell you the differences between this Watch and my old one, other than battery life.

This has been the story of Apple Watch hardware basically forever. Every few years, a new feature or design comes along, but otherwise, things are pretty sleepy.

I’m actually okay with that strategy, as no one other than the people reading this article upgrades their Apple Watch each year. However, this slow pace has kept the product line fairly narrow. The SE and Series Watches are indistinguishable from each other by the consumer, and even the Ultra isn’t a massive departure from the original recipe. Like the iPhone before it, it’s time for Apple to branch out.

After years of upheaval, watchOS has settled into a good place, but some of its old woes are still around. Apps will fail to update. Complications will become stale. Media handoff can be slow. And that’s all with an iPhone present. Flipping on the cellular radio and taking the Watch out alone can still be a frustratingly limited experience.

Vision Pro: 1/5

I honestly think my headset is still running an early beta of visionOS 26, but I’d have to charge it up to know for sure.

Home: 4/5

If you had told me five years ago that HomeKit would serve as the spiritual father of a smart home platform that tears down the old walls built around Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, I would not have believed you. Yet here we are, with Matter continuing to grow in both capability and availability.

Having moved in 2025, I’ve been slowly building a new HomeKit setup, and it’s been very, very smooth. Things aren’t perfect, but putting something together with products from various vendors is way easier than it used to be.

Apple TV: 2/5

For the 2023 Report Card, I wrote, “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long, it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again.”

I also said, “tvOS continues to feel trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix.”

That’s still all true, and I bet I can copy and paste it again in a year.

Services: 4/5

I use a bunch of Apple services on a regular basis, and they’re all solid. My photos and other data sync quickly and smoothly. Apple Music is great, and Apple TV (no +) continues to pump out bangers.

Some issues persist, however. Apple News+ is still filled with low-quality ads. The App Store continues to become splintered as Apple tangles with various governments around the world. Apple’s retail and support infrastructure can still feel creaky, providing uneven experiences at times.

Overall Reliability of Apple Hardware: 5/5

I bet the guy in charge of hardware would be a great CEO in the future.

Apple OS Quality: 3/5

It’s been years since I’ve had to reinstall an OS to fix an issue or spend time digging around in some Library folder, which is great.

However, because Apple keeps quoting Steve Jobs’ axiom of “Design is how it works,” the issues created by Liquid Glass cannot be ignored. There are good ideas in there, and I like a lot of the visuals, but the new UI introduced bugs and challenges for developers and users alike.

Apple Apps: 3/5

I spend a lot of time in Apple’s first-party apps, including Safari, Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Photos, Music, Logic, Terminal, and more. Some of them are great, while others need work, but my primary reflection on them is that these apps can be incredibly inconsistent. Lists in Reminders and folders in Notes should have the same options when being named and labeled. Keyboard shortcuts should be more predictable. Safari should be far less ugly.

My personal pet peeve fits in here as well: apps should have access to the entire SF Symbols library. Why am I forced to choose from a subset of them for an icon for a Reminders list or when naming a Shortcut? Emoji can partially solve these issues, but the SF Symbols library is great. It’s time Apple unlocks it.