I’m so excited to start the new job that I’m up at 4:45 am writing this blog post. I’m certainly going to feel it at the end of the day (though, to be fair, I did go to bed early and have had a good 6 hours of continuous, uninterrupted sleep)…
Anyway, the point of this post is to say that Apple’s new entry-level laptop, the MacBook Neo, is rather spiffy. For £599 (or £699 for double the storage and Touch ID), you get a MacBook powered by last year’s iPhone 16 Pro (and Pro Max) mobile processor (which, although sadly limited to 8Gb, will be more than enough for less demanding tasks). The chassis is aluminium (and comes in a variety of different colours), and the keyboard is full-size and sturdy. The display, while not as good as the MacBook Air or Pro models, is certainly good enough for most people. It hasn’t been calibrated to the many colour spaces that the more expensive MacBook range, for example. It doesn’t have MagSafe charging, but instead comes with two USB-C ports – albeit with one running at 10Gb/s thanks to USB 3 and the other at a much slower 480Mbs thanks to USB 2. Only the USB 3 port can be used to connect to an external monitor, if required. Therefore, a dongle that can drive Ethernet, video display, and multiple USB-A or USB-C ports will be part of the Neo owner’s arsenal.
But despite these limitations, this is a full, macOS-powered laptop for less than £700. It joins the Mac Mini (starting price of £599) as being one of the most affordable Macs ever made – and given the shitshow that is the AI industry is allegedly buying up all the RAM and NAND (SSD) chips for data centre use, this is an absolute bargain. Especially for the education sector.
I had intended to give one of my nephews my former SMG M2 MacBook Air, but alas, I was forced to sell it to keep things ticking along until I got the new job. But, given the price point of the Neo, when my finances are in a better position, I’d be more than happy to buy a MacBook Neo for him, as I know he wants to get into the computing field. While the Neo has neural processing built into the A18 Pro chip, I wouldn’t want to try running any LLMs on it. With the Swift programming language (all the tools are included), he could certainly learn to build his own Mac and iOS apps, for example. Then there’s Terminal. He could learn Unix (well, the BSD equivalent), too, which is a handy skill in today’s IT market (along with Bash, Python, etc.). As a result, it wouldn’t take him long to get used to Linux. There is huge potential here.
The Neo has a lot of potential. There are a lot of naysayers that say that 8Gb is not going to be enough – especially in five years’ time and it’ll just lead to e-waste – but as somebody who ran a 13″ MacBook Pro with the base M1 chip when they first launched with just 8Gb RAM and 256Gb SSD, it worked well enough for this sysadmin – though 16Gb or 24Gb are much more preferable for those going beyond word processing and light video editing work. Also, remember that Apple generally supports its products for at least 5-6 years, including OS updates. It will have to support 8Gb RAM on these models for that length of time. I have no doubt they may switch out the A18 Pro chip for the A19 Pro chip, which has 12 GB of onboard RAM at some point, but that won’t happen for at least a year or two.
I think the MacBook Neo will take off and do spectacularly well, given the current economic climate, and I look forward to seeing the first batch of reviews as they come in this week.