'Apple's gonna sell these by the boatload': why the new MacBook Neo is already the most important product of 2026

Apple MacBook Neo is probably the most important new consumer electronics product of this still-new year. It's not the most powerful laptop Apple has ever produced, but few products have thrown open the door to a new market and buying possibilities in quite the same way.

The MacBook Neo arrives as a budget-laptop-busting portable that starts at just $599 / £599 / AU$899 ($499 / £499 / AU$749 for the education market) and rewrites the rules for a budget laptop.

With a 256GB hard drive and 8GB RAM, it may not sound like it's packed with possibilities, but Apple also equipped the MacBook Neo with the still impressive A18 Pro — and if you haven't had any experience with Apple Silicon, you are in for a treat.

MacBook Neo First Look: everything you need to know about Apple's cheapest MacBook - YouTube

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In the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, the chip always had tons of power and what I like to call headroom. These chips are almost too powerful for your pint-sized pocket PC, but the MacBook Neo should make ample use of the chip.

Is this the MacBook you've been waiting for?

It should be noted that $599 will not get you the Touch ID power button, and if you want that and 512GB, you will pay $699 / £699 / AU$1,099. Now, that's still an excellent price, and it reminds me a bit of the Walmart sales on those MacBook Air M1 laptops. Any time the deal approached $699, they would fly off the shelves.

Now imagine a 2.7-lb / 1.23kg, recycled aluminum laptop with a high-resolution Liquid Retina Display, spatial-audio speakers, two USB-C ports (only one is a fast USB-3), an HD webcam, and a large physical trackpad for $599 — and it's a MacBook, running MacOS.

In my experience, people shopping for low-cost laptops for students (grade school, high school, college) are often not considering MacBooks because of the cost. $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799 (16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage to start) is a fair value for the MacBook Air, but it's not a budget system.

Those shopping at big box retailers and online are often looking at $300 (or cheaper) Chromebooks and then suffering the consequences of underpowered systems. If they want more local power and storage, they're usually paying $400-to-$700 anyway. Apple's MacBook line was not in that range.

Rewriting the rules

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The MacBook Neo changes that equation, and in style no less. I've seen and touched the new MacBook Neo (at Apple's March Experience event), and it is every bit an Apple product.

Budget laptops can feel plasticky (because they often are) and feature dull screens and muffled audio. The MacBook Neo features all the materials and tolerances you expect from an Apple product.

It's attractive and colorful, with hues that bleed all the way onto the keyboard.

Now, I can't yet speak to the performance of the A18 Pro with 8GB of RAM on a 13-inch laptop. But in my brief experiences with it thus far, it looked relatively peppy, even playing a new Oceanhorn 2 Apple Arcade game with some pretty nice-looking atmospheric effects.

I'm sure we'll test one in short order and know the full capabilities and deficits of Apple's new budget laptop, but my prediction is that the MacBook Neo is the hottest product of the back-to-school season, Apple's gonna sell them by the boatload, and supplies will be very limited.

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