The Pros and Cons of the $599 MacBook Neo

“APPLE UNVEILED the new MacBook Neo on Wednesday with a price tag of $599. That's historically low for the company. The Neo is available March 11, with preorders starting yesterday.

 

The new MacBook is just over half the price of the M5 MacBook Air, also announced this week.

 

Pros

 

It has many of the features shoppers would look for in an Apple laptop: a sturdy aluminum case and two USB-C ports. Apple even says it gets up to 16 hours of battery life, a few hours shy of the MacBook Air.

 

If you upgrade to the $699 model, you can get Touch ID for secure access and Apple Pay.

 

It's just a hair thicker than the MacBook Air (and the same weight) and comes in four color options: silver, indigo, the pinkish "blush" and new lime-green "citrus" -- and the keyboards are color-coordinated.

 

Cons

 

The biggest thing is that the MacBook Neo runs on a less powerful chip, the A18 Pro, a previous-generation processor that powered the iPhone 16 Pro. The chip supports Apple Intelligence AI features, but might fall short in some tasks.

 

Its 13-inch screen is a bit smaller and has fewer features than the Air's, and you can only attach a single external 4K monitor.

 

The FaceTime camera has a resolution of 1080p, similar to what's on older MacBook Airs but not as good as the newer 12-megapixel cameras with Center Stage that the top-selling Airs have now. It has two speakers, instead of the Air's four-speaker array.

 

And the keyboard doesn't have backlighting.

 

The $699 model not only adds Touch ID but also doubles the internal storage from 256GB to 512GB. However, you can't upgrade the RAM: It's fixed at 8GB.

 

Final thoughts

 

With the MacBook Neo, Apple is establishing a new baseline for its laptop line. A basic iPad-plus-keyboard also starts at $599. You can do a surprising amount of work on it, but not as much as on a Mac.

 

This is meant to square off against higher-end Chromebooks. Those education-focused laptops can cost up to $800 (though also as low as $100). And some Windows PC laptops are priced in a similar range.” [1]

 

1. The Pros and Cons of the $599 MacBook Neo. Nguyen, Nicole.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Mar 2026: A11.