The next MacBook Neo would be perfect after these five changes

So yours truly has now spent almost eight weeks with the MacBook Neo, Apple’s most affordable laptop ever, working with it, gaming with it, still testing out various things in order to find exactly where the limits of this $599 device are in terms of long-term usability and everyday performance. The Neo somehow never fails to impress. Although bringing it to its knees is not that hard, it’s also unrealistic: in order to achieve such a thing, one always ends up using it in ways totally not in line with how mainstream consumers – the people this entry-level laptop is designed for – would use it in real life.

This – the overall impression that the MacBook Neo is an extremely built-for-purpose product – is the very same conclusion the detailed review of yours truly came to… and it seems to be holding up well (for now). That doesn’t mean the Neo is perfect: it simply means that Apple chose to cut the right corners in order to hit that attractive price point. Since the Neo will almost certainly evolve over time, though, one can’t help but think whether the company could manage to cut even less corners next time around in order to offer a meaningfully better entry-level MacBook in, say, 2027.

It would obviously be easy to just list the shortcomings of the current Neo model and ask of Apple to address those, but – in the case of this particular product – there’s a catch: the attractive price points of $499/$599/$699 would have to remain exactly the same or much of the Neo’s appeal would simply not be there anymore. How could Apple improve on this model, then, while keeping it this affordable? Here are five ways the company could go about it, ranked from the most important to the less important one as indicated by around two months of living with the current MacBook Neo. Shall we?

Well, yes, more RAM – but how?

Yes, that’s the most obvious – and maybe the only truly necessary – upgrade the next version of the MacBook Neo could sport, so let’s get that out of the way first: the only thing holding back Apple’s entry-level laptop from simply doing more are those 8GB of RAM as dictated by the A18 Pro chip. Yours truly always wished that the company would pair it with more RAM, but that would have led to a custom chip, which would have made the Neo more expensive to make and thus unable to hit its attractive price point.

The one option making sense for both Apple and consumers – since they would both prefer low production costs and economies of scale leading to an attractive price point – would be for the next MacBook Neo to sport the A19 Pro chip the iPhone 17 Pro is built around. That chip comes with 12GB of RAM, which may not allow for everything 16GB of system memory would, but it’s clearly preferable to the 8GB of RAM currently available to MacBook Neo owners. The A19 Pro is a bit faster than the A18 Pro (it comes with faster RAM too), but the jump from 8GB to 12GB of system memory would make more of a difference in everyday use.

A faster SSD – which could be a problem too

Another upgrade that would help the Neo’s successor perform better in real-world use cases has to do with SSD speeds. The data storage chips currently used in a MacBook Neo operate about as fast as slow PCIe NVME 3.0 SSD drives did on PC a few years back (around 1800MB/sec in reads and writes in the 256GB configuration), which is OK but not great. They do better in the 512GB configuration (around 3000MB/sec in reads and writes), although it’s not all easy to tell the difference unless macOS uses the SSD as a scratch disk (virtual memory).

If Apple does indeed go for the A19 Pro chip for the next MacBook Neo model, that would allow for SSD speeds north of 4000MB/sec in reads and writes, which would make macOS feel snappier and more responsive in basically all use cases. Here’s the catch, though: to offer that, Apple would have to go with 512GB for the base model of the Neo, as 256GB of storage paired with the A19 Pro are actually slower (!) in write speeds than 256GB paired with the A18 Pro due to how NAND chips are configured (single channel or dual channel).

That could be a problem because – since Apple will obviously strive to keep costs down – chances are it would still prefer to offer a MacBook Neo with 256GB of storage and a 512GB option, rather than one sporting 512GB of base storage and an 1TB option. In other words, if that comes to pass, we’d end up having to chose between two versions of the same product featuring decidedly different storage performance. Oh, well.

A backlit keyboard – as it turns out, it matters

This was one of the concessions Apple made that basically everyone reviewing the MacBook Neo – including yours truly, admittedly – deemed as acceptable at first. It’s only a few weeks later that such an omission proves to be much more bothersome than initially anticipated. See, in good light or controlled light, not having a backlit keyboard is never a problem – especially for touch typists who only need to loosely place their fingers correctly on the Neo’s keyboard just once before starting to use it.

Most of those people, though, are likely using computers for many hours every day – they are, in other words, professionals of some sort. What about everyone else? It’s safe to assume that many mainstream consumers are not touch typists and that they’d need to use their MacBook Neo in low light or in the dark from time to time… in which case a backlit keyboard is all but necessary. Plus, this entry-level Apple laptop is heavily promoted as the ideal MacBook for pupils and students, the majority of which (a) are not touch typists and (b) need to use their computers to write late in the evening or at night more often than they’d probably care to admit.

Yours truly believes that a backlit keyboard would not be that expensive a feature for Apple to add to the next MacBook Neo model – or enough to affect that all-important price point anyway. It doesn’t have to be a crazy configurable RGB implementation or anything: a simple soft white glow would be fine in the overwhelming majority of cases. Here’s hope that this one is not overlooked: it’s one thing to not have a backlit Apple logo on the back of a MacBook’s screen but quite another to not see clearly what keys to press in poor lighting, no?

A better battery – although not necessarily a much bigger one

The MacBook Neo – if used more or less as intended – does offer what amounts to almost all-day real-world operating time despite its smallish 36.5 watt-hour battery. This is possible because the A18 Pro chip does not need as much power as other laptop-class processors (including Apple’s own M-Series). Truth be told, though, some of us were expecting much longer battery life because we just assumed that the Neo would sport a proper laptop battery… which turned out not to be the case after all.

Apple can improve on the current MacBook Neo in that particular area by following one of three possible approaches (or even combine some of them). The company could bring up the capacity of the standard lithium-ion battery to, say, around 50 watt-hours without cost or weight becoming a serious concern. The increase might sound small, but it would easily add around 3-4 hours of battery life, making the Neo a true all-day device for everyone. Alternatively, if Apple switched to silicon-carbon anode batteries it would achieve basically the same thing without making the built-in battery any bigger (Si-C anode batteries feature much higher energy density).

There’s clearly some room for improvement here and the MacBook Neo would greatly benefit from it: its main target demographic appreciates long battery life more than almost any other feature in modern tech products. Even if it’s just the A19 Pro chip Apple counts on to increase that device’s operating time (it is quite a bit more energy-efficient than the A18 Pro) it will obviously still be welcome. Combined with either a somewhat bigger battery or a battery based on better technology, even more so.

Faster charging – possible without major hardware upgrades

Last but not least: regardless of whether Apple uses a different battery for the inevitable successor of the current MacBook Neo, everyone would appreciate it if the new model charged faster. It now takes around two and a half to three hours to fully charge a Neo – despite its smallish battery, even when using the quickest charger the device can use – because the Neo simply doesn’t support fast charging in laptop terms.

If the next MacBook Neo is indeed built around the A19 Pro, then charging will be faster compared to the current A18 Pro (even if the battery remains unchanged) due to the newer chip allowing for higher power delivery, better thermal monitoring and better power management in general. It would obviously be great if Apple tweaked the A19 Pro further, letting it support chargers capable of delivering more than 40 Watts through the USB 3.0 USB-C port, but the Neo’s fanless design makes this unlikely. One can only hope, no?

What’s interesting about all of the above is that they are rather easy, even obvious upgrades that would substantially improve an already good laptop without making it much more expensive to manufacture. What Apple managed was to put together an almost perfect computer for its intended target group – an unusually balanced one for a first-gen product, even – so, now, all it has to do is tweak and refine until there’s almost no room for complaint (for the price a MacBook Neo should always hit). Yours truly feels that none of these improvements are unrealistic, but let’s come back to this piece in, say, a year’s time, shall we?