Yesterday Apple unleashed the MacBook Neo... which is not so much a MacBook, but an iPhone with a screen and keyboard. That's because it's using the Apple iPhone A18 Pro chip instead of the M-Series found in MacBook Air & Pro. And yet it runs all Mac apps out of the box, which is pretty cool.
And it's just $599 ($499 for students!). Or $699 if you want the memory upgraded from 256GB to 512GB.
It's a wacky topsy-turvy world where Apple has value for the money against the PC competition. Or, in this case, the ChromeBook competition. This is a great laptop for those who don't require the raw power of an M5 chip, which is overkill in a lot of ways for most people. If you're mostly surfing the web and writing emails, or taking notes in class, here's your machine. And it arrives in four colors...
The promo video is kinda fun...
What's surprising is that Apple didn't cheap out where they absolutely could have. It's got an aluminum chassis, a great keyboard (with TouchID on the $699 model!), a real trackpad, and a decent display (which is 13-inches, an inch bigger than the 12-inch Mac that I used for travel back in the day). The only thing that gives me pause is the mere 8GB of memory, but that's probably adequate for light computer use.
Earlier, Apple upgraded the MacBook Pro to a pair of bigger M5 series chips. My current laptop is the M2 Max with a MacBench score of 2749, so naturally I'm coveting the newer, faster, more powerful machine. For the work I do, it's looking pretty incredible. The base-model M5 from last year scores 4228 on MacBench... which means the new M5 Pro and M5 Max are probably a leap above that, pushing 4500 or higher.
Alas, the ads Apple created for both the US and UK are awful, which is a bizarre contrast to the Neo ad...
Ye gads what a mess.
I don't really have the money for a new laptop (I just had to pay $800 to get a pressure regulator installed on my water line because it was getting dangerously high for some reason), but given the time it would save me for renders and such, it might just be worth trying to scrape some money together to have it. I don't even know that I'd need the Ultra. The Pro is probably plenty. For now. Because once you get used to really fast renders, all you want is even faster renders.
Or maybe I should wait for the M6 models?
Why can't I be a millionaire who doesn't have to worry about the cost of always buying the latest and greatest.
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My wife really likes this Neo and, let’s face it, we’re due. We haven’t purchased a new computer for home since 2009 with her MacBook. That did a while ago and I’ve been using a 2016 MacBook Pro since then that my old employer gave me. Still works nicely but the battery life is jack. We done use this for heavy anything. I do HOA Board meetings every other month via Zoom and take minutes and it’s been used for job applications. But it’s not even used for bill pay. So this is a good price.
The criticism I see for the Neo is crazy. People comparing things that make zero sense for the target audience to care about. I think this is a huge win for a lot of people.