MacBook Neo is the Chosen One

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RockRock8

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Apple silicon is the glitch in the matrix. With breakthrough performance per watt, advanced technologies, and the fastest cores on the planet, Apple silicon now lets Apple finally create a brand new category of MacBook: the MacBook Neo.

The MacBook Neo is powered by an A18 Pro chip with 8GB of memory and 256 GB for storage, vastly outperforming most low cost notebooks in a beautiful and colorful and fun industrial design.

The Retina display is 219 PPI, 500 nits, with an antireflective coating. This vastly outclasses most displays in its category

Starting at just $599, MacBook Neo is Apple's first sub-$899 MacBook. This day was a long time in the making. After years of perfecting manufacturing processes for Unibody, MacBook Neo is able to combine a Retina Display, high performing chip, 16 hour battery life (video streaming; 11 hours for wireless web) , and rigid and beautiful design for just $599 to consumers and $499 for students and teachers. For 512GB and Touch ID, it's just $699

It arrives in multiple colors: blush, indigo, silver, and citrus.

With a 1080p FaceTime HD camera and two side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio, this notebook doesn't skimp on quality like many lower cost notebooks do.

It's Apple's most environmentally friendly MacBook. It is made with 60% recycled content.

The enclosure is manufactured with a material-efficient forming process that uses 50 percent less aluminum compared to traditional machining methods
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www.apple.com

Say hello to MacBook Neo

Apple today unveiled MacBook Neo, an all-new laptop that delivers the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price.
www.apple.com
 
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RockRock8 said:
@Cmaier what do you think? Since you said you were considering it
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Some thoughts:

- indigo just looks gray to me, but what do i know. In fact, other than yellow, I barely see any tint on the various colors.

- yellow looks weird. If i were buying one, I’d definitely by yellow

- Strange that to get touchid you need to buy the higher memory configuration, but:

- nobody should buy a 256GB configuration these days. Save four or five more hours of wages and buy the $599 configuration

Looks pretty much like I expected, and makes the Air an even better deal to get upgrades across the board for a little more money.

In my daughter’s case, it’s not an upgrade really from the M1 MBA. It will be interesting to see some benchmarks - we really don’t know what an A18 Pro can do with a higher thermal envelope. Also, I didn’t notice the RAM specs anywhere.

As a second mac for just traveling, I’ll need to see it in person to gauge size/weight. The old tiny MBA (11”) was perfect for me, and obviously these are bigger.

Overall a very good computer for most people. My advice to those who ask me, though, would be to buy an MBA because for a little more money they will likely get more years of use from it (enough so that, in the long run, they would save money)
 
Interesting to hear your thoughts. I disagree on the colors. They look pretty differentiated to me.

It's the same weight and a bit smaller than the Air. This is a low cost model, not a ultra portable model.

I agree that it's good for most people as well. A lot of $600 laptops I looked at use 1080p displays on 15" or larger. The display is important. 500 nits is really excellent for this price
 
I really see this as an education model to compete with the upper end of the Chromebooks and great as a kid computer for when they’re old enough. And yes good for adults too though I agree with @Cmaier the Air can be better long term value.
 
Here's another angle too: it democratizes access to the App Store developer program. For $599/$499 people can now get an all-in-one product that lets them develop App Store apps!
 
dada_dave said:
I really see this as an education model to compete with the upper end of the Chromebooks and great as a kid computer for when they’re old enough. And yes good for adults too though I agree with @Cmaier the Air can be better long term value.
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The best Chromebook competitor is an iPad. My kid’s school gave everyone ipads - last year they upgraded them all to M4 ipad pros, with the magic keyboard (we have to buy our own apple pencils). They use them for everything.

My kid is editor-in-chief of the school paper, so she uses her mac for adobe and page layout, and playing minecraft, and that’s about it.

The iPad Pro route costs more, but for the things they do it’s a better computer (because of touch and pencil, and many of the apps they use are not native to Mac). But they didn’t really need iPad Pros - I’m guessing someone at Apple donated them or gave them a big discount. (eddie cue’s kid went to this school a few years ago, and there are always apple employees as parents).
 
dada_dave said:
I really see this as an education model to compete with the upper end of the Chromebooks and great as a kid computer for when they’re old enough. And yes good for adults too though I agree with @Cmaier the Air can be better long term value.
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We have an M1 MBA/512GB that's mostly used by my wife for basic tasks like email, web access, and writing. I occasionally take it when I'm traveling, as I prefer it to my iPad for tweaking presentations. Five years in and it still does the job well.

If we didn't already have the MBA, the Neo might be an attractive option, though I agree that the current and recent used MBAs are probably a better long-term investment. It'll be interesting to see how the Neo performs in practice, since benchmarks don't really do that. I also wonder how long it'll support macOS upgrades.
 
$499 student discount pricing is just fantastic. If my life had its clock rewound 12 years, I would love this machine. I'm in the market for beefier machines these days, but this is a killer deal I think. To what CMaier said, the RAM spec is 8GB no matter which of the configs you get. I personally think that's fine. I also think that 256GB can be enough for this machine's target audiences honestly.
Heck, I may get this one day instead of an iPad. I like the 13" iPads, but I don't really like iPad user experience compared to Mac. I like having a keyboard always available, and with Magick Keyboard a 13" iPad is pretty expensive. And basically the only thing I use iPad for is having something smaller than my 16" MBP for taking to DnD. But a 13" MBN is fine for that. Generally for having something cheaper to take around where I don't need the power of my Max chip-machines.

But I have no need at the moment - But in a few gens I may get this.
 
casperes1996 said:
$499 student discount pricing is just fantastic. If my life had its clock rewound 12 years, I would love this machine. I'm in the market for beefier machines these days, but this is a killer deal I think. To what CMaier said, the RAM spec is 8GB no matter which of the configs you get. I personally think that's fine. I also think that 256GB can be enough for this machine's target audiences honestly.
Heck, I may get this one day instead of an iPad. I like the 13" iPads, but I don't really like iPad user experience compared to Mac. I like having a keyboard always available, and with Magick Keyboard a 13" iPad is pretty expensive. And basically the only thing I use iPad for is having something smaller than my 16" MBP for taking to DnD. But a 13" MBN is fine for that. Generally for having something cheaper to take around where I don't need the power of my Max chip-machines.

But I have no need at the moment - But in a few gens I may get this.
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I might get one just to replace my old intel MBP (the one with the touch bar - I think it’s from 2016). It sits in my home office and is used only as an airprint server, a home media server to my Apple TVs (it connects to a NAS), and a carbon copy cloner job that copies shares from one NAS to another. I used to just always retire my MBP to do those jobs when I got a new one, but I’ve been keeping my Macs longer and longer.

I guess I will wait and see how compelling the 16” M6 MBP that is supposedly coming later this year is (in which case my M1 Max MBP will inherit my home office desk).
 
I actually like the indigo one, if they don't have space grey.

My biggest problem is the RAM. I just closed all apps on my Mac mini M4 Pro and did a purge.
Almost 6 GB used. Now with Safari opened, almost 8 GB used.
To be at least halfway future proof for a few years, 16 GB is the minimum for macOS in my book.

The interfaces are better than my MacBook Air M1, because that one didn't have the magsafe connector yet.
Correction: The interfaces are equal to my MacBook Air M1, neither has magsafe.
The A18 Pro only has 2P+4E cores, but for a lot of people, who just surf the web, write e-mails, and edit a few documents that is most likely more than enough performance. Given the advancements in cores, my guess is that it will be faster than my MacBook Air for a lot of use cases.
 
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Interesting. The trackpad actually clicks - it moves, not haptic. From corner-to-corner (not hinged at one edge).

Was this to make it cheaper? Or is it actually an improvement? (Not sure if it can deep-click like a regular macbook?)
 
Cmaier said:
The best Chromebook competitor is an iPad. My kid’s school gave everyone ipads - last year they upgraded them all to M4 ipad pros, with the magic keyboard (we have to buy our own apple pencils). They use them for everything.

My kid is editor-in-chief of the school paper, so she uses her mac for adobe and page layout, and playing minecraft, and that’s about it.

The iPad Pro route costs more, but for the things they do it’s a better computer (because of touch and pencil, and many of the apps they use are not native to Mac). But they didn’t really need iPad Pros - I’m guessing someone at Apple donated them or gave them a big discount. (eddie cue’s kid went to this school a few years ago, and there are always apple employees as parents).
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Yeah our school uses Chromebooks. With pricing difference between the two you can't really compare. These cheaper MacBooks should be great for that audience.
 
I think it's an incredible value and a perfect personal computer for many customers out there. I also think it's outdated the moment it came out :) To me it seems that they are using it as an experiment to gauge the market interest. I also wonder whether it will be updated every year like rest of the mobile lineup, or whether it will be on a lower cadence.
 
Ok, this is dumb:

One port is a USB-C 3 port with support for data transfer speeds up to 10 Gb/s, while the other is a USB-C 2 port with support for data transfer speeds up to 480 Mb/s. Both support charging, but only the USB-C 3 port features DisplayPort, so users will need to make sure they are hooked up to the correct port when using an external display.
 
Looks like the logo on the back of the lid is embossed, not shiny. Strange things that reduce price…
 
Cmaier said:
Ok, this is dumb:

One port is a USB-C 3 port with support for data transfer speeds up to 10 Gb/s, while the other is a USB-C 2 port with support for data transfer speeds up to 480 Mb/s. Both support charging, but only the USB-C 3 port features DisplayPort, so users will need to make sure they are hooked up to the correct port when using an external display.
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How are they supposed to retcon more capability into an already developed chip lol? They could have just done 1 USB port, but I'm glad they did 2. As for the port, they could have labeled it but ultimately from user guides and using the product you'll find which is the 3 Port and remember.
 
KingOfPain said:
My biggest problem is the RAM.
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I agree. I got my cousin a 15" MBA with 16/512 because he kept getting memory warnings on the M1 8/256 and was filling up the storage pretty quickly. It looks like Neo is aimed at casual users, but if they are not in the habit of closing tabs, it will tend to hit memory pressure limits pretty quickly. Casual users tend to need more headroom, and people who could use this thing efficiently would want a more powerful machine.
 
RockRock8 said:
How are they supposed to retcon more capability into an already developed chip lol? They could have just done 1 USB port, but I'm glad they did 2. As for the port, they could have labeled it but ultimately from user guides and using the product you'll find which is the 3 Port and remember.
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Customers don’t want to hear about your problems. They don’t even know there’s a difference between them. They will just plug things in and get slow performance or find that things don’t work.

If I were Apple, I’d leave just the good port, remove the bad port, and add magsafe for charging.
 
Cmaier said:
Customers don’t want to hear about your problems. They don’t even know there’s a difference between them. They will just plug things in and get slow performance or find that things don’t work.

If I were Apple, I’d leave just the good port, remove the bad port, and add magsafe for charging.
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Lmfao okay. I guess I have a little more faith that people can read user guides or look up how to connect displays, etc. You also can't connect a 5K display, but customers don't want to hear about problems etc etc etc. If they don't include a 2nd port? People don't want to hear about problems etc etc etc

I don't think lack of MagSafe and the split between USB is a coincidence. It seems tied to the chip, which isn't going to be altered for a low cost MacBook. I'm not a hardware engineer, so you can discuss that yourself
 
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