Apple’s New MacBook Neo With A18 Pro Chip Starts at $599

Apple has just pulled the wraps off the MacBook Neo, its most affordable MacBook ever, starting at $599 (and $499 for education). As expected, the new entry-level MacBook is powered by an iPhone chip, the A18 Pro previously seen on the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, and it comes with just 8GB of unified storage that’s not upgradable.

The MacBook Neo has an aluminum body available in four colors: blush, indigo, silver, and a fresh new citrus. Despite its smaller 13-inch screen, it weighs as much as the 13.6-inch MacBook Air (2.7 pounds (1.23 kg). To reach that $599 starting price, Apple cut some corners here and there, as there’s no backlit keyboard, the Touch ID sensor is also only available on the 512GB model, and the 13-inch Liquid Retina display doesn’t support Apple’s True Tone technology. There’s also no Force Touch trackpad, and the 1080p FaceTime HD camera has no Center Stage support.

“We’re incredibly excited to introduce MacBook Neo, which delivers the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “Built from the ground up to be more affordable for even more people, MacBook Neo is a laptop only Apple could create. It features a durable aluminum design in four beautiful colors; a brilliant Liquid Retina display; Apple silicon-powered performance; all-day battery life; a high-quality camera, mics, and speakers; a Magic Keyboard and Multi-Touch trackpad; and the intuitive and powerful features of macOS. There is simply no other laptop like it.”

The A18 Pro chip on the MacBook Neo comes with 6 CPU cores and 5 GPU cores, and the 8GB of unified memory is not upgradable. Memory bandwidth is also limited to 60GB/s, which is quite slow compared to the 153GB/s on the M4 MacBook Air. Still, Apple believes that its MacBook Neo performs better than more expensive PCs with Intel chips.

“MacBook Neo with A18 Pro is up to 50 percent faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5. And for more demanding activities, it’s up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing,” the company said today.

When you compare the MacBook Neo with the latest M4 MacBook Air, you can see other missing features: The dual-speaker sound system on the Neo doesn’t support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking when using supported models of AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max. The Neo’s headphone jack also lacks advanced support for high-impedance headphones.

The MacBook Neo is also limited to Wi-Fi 6E, while the M4 MacBook Air supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 protocol. As for connectivity, there are two USB-C ports just like on the MacBook Air, but they are not Thunderbolt 4 ports: One port is USB 3, and the other one is USB 2.

It’s not surprising to see Apple cut some features to reach this price point, but the main issue is probably the 8GB of memory, which is probably not enough in 2026. All other Mac models now start with 16GB of memory, but the MacBook Neo still supports Apple Intelligence features. Whether that remains true in the future remains to be seen, however.

The MacBook Neo is available to pre-order starting today, and it will start shipping on March 11 alongside the other products Apple announced earlier this week.