The MacBook Neo is surprisingly affordable, unsurprisingly limited

Everyone following Apple news closely was pretty sure it was coming – the company itself leaked, accidentally or not, its name one day before its unveiling – so no surprises there: the MacBook Neo was always going to be the most important among several Apple announcements this week because, well, this is a company that doesn’t really do budget laptops – so if it does, what would one look like?

All we actually needed, though, was answers to just two questions: how low would Apple be willing to go in terms of pricing and what corners would it choose to cut to get there?

Well… about that: there’s good news and there’s bad news. What’s more, for a few other things it will take a bit of time before we can have a clear picture about the MacBook Neo. Let’s break everything down based on what’s been announced and what we know about Apple’s new laptop so far.

MacBook Neo: some corners cut… but, for the price point Apple hit, well-chosen ones

So: the MacBook Neo is close to what information leaks making the rounds on the Web had described for almost half a year. It’s a 13-inch laptop running macOS, powered not by an M-series processor but by Apple’s A18 Pro chip (the same one found in the iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max). It joins the MacBook line-up as an entry point, priced at $599 ($499 for education) with 256GB of storage or $699 with 512GB of storage and TouchID. It is available to preorder now and it will hit several markets across the globe beginning Wednesday, March 11.

So the price of the MacBook Neo is surprisingly low – considering Apple’s traditional margins and track record, as well as some pessimistic rumors circulating over the last few days – especially in its education form, which is not surprising with two of the main target groups of this particular laptop being school classrooms and students in general. The almost traditional $100 upgrade in storage is not surprising either, by Apple’s standards, as isn’t the great build quality of the MacBook Neo, as reported by Engadget or The Verge in hands-on impressions published shorty after its announcement. So far so good.

Other nice things about it are encouraging too. By going through the corners yours truly believed Apple should not cut in order to meet a low price for this particular laptop, what emerges is an unexpectedly well-rounded device. Its screen is of high enough resolution and high enough brightness, its pair of USB-C ports both allow for charging and data transfers, its wireless connectivity is very good, its camera and speakers seem adequate for its price point. The MacBook Neo’s battery is obviously not a usual laptop-class one at just 36.5 watt-hours, but Apple still promises up to 11 hours of Web use over Wi-Fi, which is perfectly fine for casual everyday use.

Where did Apple choose to cut corners, then? It’s mostly about the niceties we’ve been accustomed to with other MacBooks over the years: the keyboard keys are not backlit, there’s no MagSafe charging port – no other ports than the two USB-C ones and the headphone jack, actually – and the bezels around the screen are more iPad-like than some people would like. The jury is out about the quality of video its webcam is capable of or the quality of sound those speakers can offer, yes, but one can’t imagine either of those being too low in 2026 terms.

No: there’s basically just one corner the company seems to have cut in order to hit that impressively low price point. The problem is that, all things considered, it’s a pretty important corner.

MacBook Neo: the 8GB RAM situation and what it may mean for consumers

It’s too hard to cast Apple’s choice in a positive light here, so yours truly won’t even try: 8GB of RAM isn’t the amount of system memory any new laptop should come with in 2026. It doesn’t matter that it will initially seem like “just enough” to many people when the MacBook Neo gets released later in March, as it probably will: the A18 Pro is a fast enough processor for the vast majority of the tasks students and mainstream consumers would take on with this laptop – and, on a fresh macOS installation, Apple’s affordable laptop will appear to have no trouble with such tasks at all.

It is what comes after some months and years of use that’s the problem. Not only aren’t those 8GB of RAM upgradeable, but they will also be asked to handle progressively more complex macOS versions than Tahoe and – as consumers get more comfortable with everything they can do with their laptop – more demanding apps or games. The MacBook Neo will start using the internal SSD as temporary memory more and more often, wearing it down faster as a result. Long story short: 8GB of RAM assumes that every MacBook Neo owner will only use it as intended, just for the things it’s designed for, for years to come… while this amount of memory isn’t even enough for all the use cases many consumers would find for such a laptop today.

Had Apple offered a 16GB version of the MacBook Neo as an option, we tech journalists would at least be able to tell consumers “Look, if you are 100% sure that you will never use this laptop for anything other than absolutely basic stuff, get the base configuration and you’ll be fine. But if you want a laptop that can meet your needs while you do more and more with it over time, then you need to future-proof your purchase, so it’s better to bite the bullet and make use of the 16GB option”. But such an option does not exist, which is why Apple’s particular choice with the MacBook Neo will likely prove to be problematic in the long run.

Even if Apple did offer a 16GB/512GB version of the MacBook Neo, it would probably try to put a $799 price tag on it… in which case the “budget laptop” would suddenly get too close to a MacBook Air for comfort. New laptops do not exist in a vacuum either: it’s fair to assume that e.g. many students know enough about computers nowadays to take a look at the specs of the MacBook Neo and start looking for new or refurbished, M3- or M4-based MacBook Air models still available. Even worse for Apple, they might not look at the company’s laptops at all if they can get a just-good-enough but more future-proof Windows laptop for $699-$799.

That is why the MacBook Neo should not be anything but an educated (huh), focused, deliberate purchase: because of those 8GB of RAM, one has to already know exactly what this laptop will be used for – not just in 2026, but way beyond that. This may be a lot to ask of young people probably interested in modern games or of mainstream consumers getting comfortable with what their computers can do over time. As a play to make all those people upgrade to a more capable and costly MacBook at some point, the MacBook Neo will likely work. As a personal device that consumers will be using for years and years… not as likely – but let’s just wait and see how it all plays out, shall we?