Apple today announced the “MacBook Neo,” an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599.
The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing.
The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels.
↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors
There’s no denying this is a great offering from Apple, and it’s going to sell really well, especially in the US. I can’t think of any other laptop on the market that offers this kind of complete package at such an attractive price point – on the Windows side, you’re going to get plastic laptops with worse displays, worse battery life, and, well, Windows. For education buyers, the price drops from $599 to $499, making it a no-brainer choice for families sending their kids off to high school or university.
In the US, at least. Here in Europe, or at least in Sweden where I checked the price of the base model, it’s going for almost €800 ($930), at which point the cost-cutting measures Apple has taken are a bit harder to swallow. At that kind of price point, I’m not going to accept a mere 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a paltry 60Hz display. When I saw the announcement of this new MacBook earlier today, I wondered if this could be my way of finally getting a macOS review on OSNews after well over a decade, but at €800 for something I won’t be using after I’m done with the review? I can’t justify that.
Regardless, you’re going to see tons of these in schools and in wrapping paper for the holiday season and birthdays, and at least at American pricing, it’s definitely a great deal.
“Europe” is not one homogenous market, in fact, not even the EU is one homogenous market (despite Brussels pretending it is). For example, in Greece, the MacBook Neo is €699 for the base version:
https://www.istorm.gr/products/13-inch-macbook-neo-mhfd4gr-a
Considering that Greece’s VAT is a rather high 24%, and that $599 is around €515 at current exchange rates, that’s only €60 extra compared to the American price once the 24% VAT is taken into account.
Since €700 is the sweet spot for a good laptop here, it’s hard to justify a PC (and the dumpset fire that is Windows 11 in appearance, functionality, and reliability) over this. Heck, even if you find a comparable laptop for €600, an extra hundred euros is perfectly justifiable to have MacOS instead of Windows 11. Yes, even considering the Macbook Neo only has 8GB or RAM while a €600 laptop may have 16GB of RAM.
Despite not being a fan of Apple the company, and no longer a fan of macOS, I have to say that macOS on Apple Silicon will be much more performant and use less RAM for the same task as a bloated Windows garbage laptop whether it has Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm under the hood. That Windows machine will need every last byte of that 16GB.
I can say this because I had both the M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM and the M1 Mac mini with 8GB, and I never once approached saturation with those devices even with heavy workloads. The A18 is overall just as fast as the M1 in benchmarks while benefiting from faster and newer generation RAM, so I think it will be quite a powerhouse for the price. I won’t touch it given my stance on Apple the company, but it will embarrass the hell out of any similarly priced Windows machine. Having full control over the hardware and OS gives Apple an undeniable advantage when it comes to performance.
I buy macs to get work done, ssh to linux box for serious number crunching. Excellent combo.
In Denmark it starts at 5499 DKK (€730), and we also have a 25% VAT. I would call this a reasonable deal given what else you can find in that price bracket or below
how is it you have a price in Denmark? In Malta it just isn’t available not even from the Apple website in preorder.
Apple are notoriously non-credible in their marketing material. The closer you follow it, the more you see the same anti-patterns of intentionally withholding crucial information. For example…
They want to compare the neo to a low end i5, which is fine…but there are many models that fit the criteria, so which freakin’ one is it apple? Huh? What are the other system specs? They don’t even offer what brand the computer was. All of this is critical information and you can’t make an objective comparison without it. Obviously apple knows this.
apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-neo/
Which intel CPU?
What was the memory speed?
What was the SSD speed?
We don’t even know when the system was manufactured.
This is objectively too vague to be useful for any legitimate performance comparison.
It seems apple knows this is a problem with their marketing, but they still want to withhold information so it cannot be independently fact checked.
Benchmarks are valuable and provide insight when used legitimately, but it’s crystal clear that apple are not revealing the parameters of their tests because they don’t want anyone to be able to independently verify their results.
It’s a shame because their products might do ok in a fair comparison, but I find it so grating for Apple to keep acting like car salesmen over and over again each product generation. It’s as though apple don’t have confidence they can promot their products on merit in a genuinely fair comparison. If you’re proud of your product, you shouldn’t need to rely on so much marketing slop as apple does. That’s just my take.
PS. I’m not criticizing the product, I’m criticizing apple’s marketing…too much BS.
8Gb is ridiculous in 2026.
My cellphone has 16gb and is 4 years old.
kwanbis,
I agree that it’s on the low side, but it depends on user needs.. 8GB may not be a problem if your applications don’t actually require 8+GB at one time. Macos uses compression and swap to page out background applications that don’t need to stay resident. A browser might have tons of tabs open, but they don’t all need to be in memory. I found this to be a very informative source on macos memory management.
“8 GB of RAM wasn’t enough? macOS RAM management explained”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb4v6YaEQa0&t=1s
On the other hand tasks that genuinely need more ram will suffer if memory swapping and compression keeps interrupting the application workflow. I run many VM’s and 8GB would be totally inadequate for my use case. Even my work with blender regularly needs more than 8GB. Additionally I’m not keen on extending memory with swap when the disks are not end-user replaceable and have a limited lifespan. It gets worse considering the 8GB spec is total for both the CPU and iGPU. Many modern games need more than 8GB for the GPU alone at higher resolutions.
8GB is definitely on the low side and people with higher requirements will probably regret not having more, I do accept that many people have more moderate needs and for them 8GB is probably ok. I don’t mind 8GB computers being sold, as long as they set realistic expectations for it. Also I’d expect lower specs to come with a lower price.
I agree. Anything less than 16GB is just not going to scale in to the future – at all. This to me feels like Apple trying to carve out a space for some sales in the AI hype driven RAM desert. Apple’s first class (and seriously unmatched) RAM compression does help here, and does provide an argument in favor of this on their specific platform – but I still think it’s not quite enough.
On the other hand, I do have an old (2018 old) Ryzen 2500 based laptop that only has 8GB of RAM (some of which is used by the integrated GPU,) that I run Bazzite on with a 100% ZRAM match, and it’s kind of fine, even for some relatively heavy containerized dev tasks. So, to undercut my own skepticism, maybe this laptop will be fine?
I should mention – that laptop is physically capable of running Windows 11 – with hacks, but Windows 11 is not capable of running on that laptop in any stable or reasonably performant way on this hardware, because Microslop has absolutely no idea how to code any more. I mean, Bazzite/Linux is amazingly fast. Why is Windows so unusable? I just don’t understand how Microslop fell so far, so fast.
In summary, if you think 8GB isn’t enough, it might be Windows brain infecting your perspective. Really, it’s fine with Bazzite on it – and Bazzite is containerized! It’s not known for sipping RAM.
I opened the link, saw the new hideous UI and immediately closed it.
If there was a 16GB model and it supported Linux it could have been my first Apple purchase for a very long time. However since Avahi is basically only running on M1 (and M2?) yet I don’t think this is something we can expect for a long time.
I really hope we will see a good low-price and decently fast ARM-laptop some time that allows for running Linux without too much of a hassle.
Why do so many Linux people want to run Linux on Apple Silicon Macbooks? We are talking about a hardware platform that doesn’t even pretend to officially support Linux in any capacity, literally everything else is better than that.
My guess is that Intel Macs became a status symbol among Linux people back in the Intel Mac days (understandable, since Intel Macs had open-spec parts), and the status symbol has outlived its justification for existing.
For me the reason would be performance and battery life. There’s no denying it’s seriously impressive hardware. I just want to stay as far away as Apples ecosystem as possible but I would not mind the hardware.
Asahi Linux doesn’t get near the battery life MacOS gets on Apple Silicon and has issues with battery drain when idle. Do Linux people buy the Apple Silicon hardware assuming Asahi Linux power management will improve further?
(yeah, yeah, I know: https://xkcd.com/644/ )
It’s so stupid to talk about Linux people like it’s a homogenic group that all do the same thing. I don’t think many people buy a recent Mac to run Linux on it since there still are issues but Asahi seem to be supporting the M1 Macs rather good now but yeah sure the battery life will not stack up to good compared to MacOS but it will stack up rather good compared to most Intel laptops.
If there was something else that was ARM based and not Apple I think most “Linux people” would be more interested in that but everything I’ve found seems very overpriced and not better supported than the Apple hardware.
kurkosdr,
That argument makes sense in the abstract, however the problem is that few manufactures are supporting mainline linux on their ARM consumer laptops.
Many are being built from components used in android phones, which is ostensibly linux… but the linux in android is somewhat bastardized and poorly supported beyond the kernels provided for their phones. It’s a struggle to find consumer products that that officially support standard mainline linux distros from the manufacturer with no caveats.
Many ARM computers built for linux are actually using components were speced for old phones and not something you’d want for an ideal computer…
https://www.makeuseof.com/arm-laptop-linux/
Even though I never cared for it, some people liked apple’s hardware. However apple did invest in making ARM CPUs with higher specs than others and I do understand why they are desirable to get working under linux.
To be clear I don’t want to sugar coat it…linux on apple M series ARM laptops has many problems, but to understand the motivation for doing it you need more context about the overall market.
Or, you know, you can stick to x86 laptops (either used Intel Macs or regular PC laptops), where support for Linux isn’t perfect but much better than Apple Silicon. Asahi Linux doesn’t even get the battery life that MacOS gets on Apple Silicon and has issues with battery drain when idle, so again, what does the ARM ISA give you here?
kurkosdr,
Of course, but it’s about tradeoffs. ARM CPUs typically use less power than their x86 counterparts.
I wouldn’t consider asahi linux to be production ready. There’s no doubt things have been tough for fans of FOSS computing on commodity ARM devices. As I said in another comment, I have personally stuck with x86 because of ARM support issues. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want a good ARM laptop. Many FOSS users do. Of course the root problem is that many manufacturers are not catering to us and we are held back because so much commodity ARM hardware is proprietary and undocumented.
fx__,
I’ve long wanted a good ARM laptop for linux too, but I’ve stuck with x86 because commodity x86 laptops are cheap, more upgradable, and are better supported.
I personally would want 16GB to be the minimum, and even that’s probably low for some things I work on especially since it doesn’t have a dedicated GPU.
I do wonder if the bottleneck on asahilinux supporting m4 macs is simply a matter of not having enough developer resources, or if there’s something more fundamental causing issue?
The support page just lists everything as “TBA”.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m4/#m4-devices
If Apple wanted to block linux from running on their CPUs, they could. It’s never been ideal to have alt-OS depending on proprietary hardware, precarious even.
I’ll take 8GB and the small victory of having the big software houses worrying at least a little bit about the system resources (and RAM) we pay top dollar for.
I find it unacceptable to boot to desktop and see the system memory usage be 10GB+ on my windows laptop.
With 12 or even 16 GB of RAM it would be a fantastic deal (if you subtract the vat,it is not that much more expensive in the EU) but 8 GB not upgradeable in 2026?
I have a Thinkpad x201s with 8GB of RAM that is from 2010 !
@ubu
This reply is coming to you from a 2012 Macbook with 16 GB of RAM (running Linux).
I’m really not on this. 600 quid – no backlit – no haptic touchpad – no touchid or 700 with that. Seriously? Those things are Apple differentiators. Especially as I’m being stung for 175 GBP on the USD price. Savage.
same, without a backlit keyboard this the ‘new’ macbook is dead in the water to me, and the name ‘Neo’ lol, like its ahead in some way, even my Galapagos Keitai has a backlit keyboard and cost 20 quid. (Neo documented meaning: “new, recent, or a new or modern form or development”), it is only one of those things ‘recent’ other than that is a laptop from the past.
Its actually nearer to 150GBP and it is the typical “Apple tax” we pay in the UK for all Apple products.
Not saying it is fair, but it is expected.
Thom, if you want to review macOS. just get a used Mac Mini or MacBook Air with M2 or higher. Will be cheaper, at least as performant and the Air is better in just about every way.