MacBooks have long been some of the most expensive laptops. Apple makes premium products and their laptops are priced accordingly. At least, that was the case until the Apple MacBook Neo, an entry-level laptop that’s so affordably priced, it’s cheaper than many smartphones.
That’s right, there’s finally a low-cost Mac in town and it’s not all that depressingly underpowered. Sure, you won’t be running hog wild with resource-intensive games and demanding graphical applications, but it should handle everyday productivity tasks with relative ease, making it an ideal entry-level machine.
The Apple MacBook Neo is an ultraportable laptop with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display sporting 2408 x 1506 resolution and 500 nits of brightness. It’s not as good as the screens on Apple’s more expensive lap tops and tablets, so there’s no 100 percent P3 color coverage (although it does claim to support one billion colors) or True Tone color temperature adjustments. Instead, it’s a conventional LCD that should be good enough for most people’s needs. According to hands-on impressions, the screen is noticeably brighter and more vibrant than those on similarly-priced Windows laptops, too, so it sounds like quite the great screen for the price. It’s lightweight, too, tipping the scales at just 2.7 pounds, making it the same weight as the MacBook Air, so it should be relatively easy to take along anywhere.
Under the colorful aluminum shell, which looks way too premium for something at this price range (no plastic in sight), sits an A18 Pro chip, which includes a six-core CPU, a five-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine. Sure, it’s a far cry from what you’ll get with the current MacBook Pro’s M series processors, but it should handle basic computing tasks just fine. The base model gets 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while an extra $100 gets you double the storage at 512GB and Touch ID on the keyboard. RAM seems locked at 8GB, though, so this will strictly be for basic productivity tasks.
The Apple MacBook Neo gets a keyboard that’s supposedly based on the MacBook Air, with keys that are color-matched to the same shade as the case. The trackpad is clickable everywhere, too, unlike the limited interactivity found on the trackpads of other budget laptops. It has a 1080p FaceTime camera, which will, hopefully, be decent enough to let you avoid buying a separate 4K webcam, along with dual microphones with beamforming technology that isolates and enhances you voice while minimizing background noise. For audio, it gets dual side-firing speakers rather than the upward-firing units on their more expensive laptops. Hopefully, it produces more decent sound than your typical budget laptop’s tinny speakers. According to Apple, it even supports Dolby Atmos spatial audio for an immersive listening experience with compatible content.
Does this mean Apple will make its OS compatible with 8GB RAM for, at least, the next few years. Seems like it. We don’t know how well their more advanced software will run on that kind of hardware, especially going forward, but it might be incentive for the company to keep things fast and lightweight, which is never a bad thing.
The Apple MacBook Neo is available now, priced starting at $599.
