Apple Announces All-New MacBook Neo As Its Cheapest Ever Laptop

Apple is bringing an all-new MacBook model for the first time in years: the new MacBook Neo is positioned as the cheapest laptop offered by the company, with a starting price low enough to make Windows and Chromebook camp nervous.

Meet MacBook Neo

Apple specifically said the MacBook Neo features an “aluminum enclosure,” and that’s not something you can easily find for a laptop this cheap. Four colors are available in Blush, Indigo, Silver and Citrus, and the whole laptop weighs 1.22kg. From the outside, you probably couldn’t tell it apart from 13-inch MacBook Airs, given that it follows the same design language, which in this case just a very flat slab accompanied by rounded edges.

Inside, you’ll find a 13-inch 16:10 IPS “Liquid Retina” display with 2408 x 1506 resolution (pretty close to QHD) that achieves up to 500 nits of brightness and 10-bit color support, with anti-reflective coating on the display for glare reduction. There’s some minor downsides: it’s 60Hz only, and despite its 10-bit color support, its color gamut is limited to sRGB only.

The processor choice is another one that requires cost-saving, in this case using the A18 Pro originally found in the iPhone 16 Pro models. The chipset has a 6-core CPU (2P+4E), but unlike the iPhones, it actually has a 5-core GPU (one less than the smartphones), plus a 16-core NPU, and is paired with just 8GB of unified RAM, plus the option of 256GB or 512GB SSD storage. Given that this is a smartphone chip, it runs cool enough on its own that no active cooling is required on this laptop.

Despite its paltry-sounding 36.5Wh battery (and the included power brick that supplies just 20W), Apple says the MacBook Neo is good for 16 hours of video streaming or 11 hours of web browsing – having a highly power-efficient smartphone chip certainly helps in this regard. That being said, the smartphone chip does come with tradeoffs in I/O. Here, you’ll only find two USB-C ports, one of which supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard (10Gbps, DisplayPort Alt Mode support), while the other only operates at USB 2.0 speeds (480Mbps). There’s also a headphone jack for wired audio.

MacBook Neo also includes a 1080p FaceTime HD camera that hides within classic bezel, so at least you won’t be staring at the rather unsightly notch like every other modern MacBooks do. It’s also got dual microphones with beamforming, plus dual side-firing speakers; the keyboard and touchpad is the same like other MacBooks, but Touch ID is an optional feature. Needless to say, it runs on macOS despite featuring a chip originally intended for iPhones, so you do get the full Apple PC experience in this little 13-inch laptop that could.

So you want to know the price, and here it is: the MacBook Neo in the base 256GB storage option is available at just RM2,499, and educators/students (the target audience we believe Apple is primarily going for with this laptop) can get an even lower pricing down to just RM2,099, making its value virtually unbeatable. There’s also the 512GB option priced at RM2,899.

Pokdepinion: Holy crap that is cheap.