Cheap ⭐

There’s a horrible, partisan headline over on Macworld that speaks to a past that no one should want to revisit: “Apple-hating tech bros are lying to you.” This headline refers to criticism of the MacBook Neo, and it’s unfair and untrue. First, anyone who criticizes an Apple product is immediately an Apple hater, not just someone who may prefer other products. Secondly, now they’re also “tech bros,” an explicit new reduction that turns critics into sub-humans. And finally, people who criticize Apple or this product specifically aren’t just incorrect, they actually know the truth and are lying to you. Only Macworld tells the truth, and the truth is that the MacBook Neo is f#$king fantastic regardless of what anyone thinks.

Yeah, we all miss the “Mac vs. PC” days. That was a good time. But instead of reducing those who disagree with opinions to being sub-human liars, I’ll just point out that we all have opinions. And that some are more educated than others. That doesn’t mean that those with a firm grasp of history and facts are always right. Nor does it mean that Macworld’s opinion of the MacBook Neo is wrong, though the way it frames those who disagree with it is 100 percent wrong and wrong-headed.

What’s lacking in this discussion is perspective.

Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and if you’re familiar with that history, you will see a familiar story playing out now. This company, which has only seen success making expensive, high-end products, is now trying to foist lower-end and lower cost products on its customer base. This isn’t the first time it’s done so. And it’s never gone well.

Consider the Apple of the 1990s, which expanded its Mac lineup dramatically with Power Macs, Mac Classics, Mac LCs, Mac Centris, and Mac Quadra models before fully losing its mind and its way with the Mac Performa series for mainstream consumers. The Performa line started off as cheaper versions of existing Macs, but before it was finally killed off it had expanded to—wait for it—over 60 different models.

The Apple of that era was chasing a dream and it’s a dream that will be familiar to anyone trying to understand what it’s doing today. 15 years after Steve Jobs’ passing, Tim Cook has brought Apple back to the point it was when Jobs returned to the company in the late 1990s and immediately slashed almost all of its too-many Mac models and other products. There are too many versions of Apple’s products today, and with that expansion comes the inevitable confusion and, yep, decline in value. This is not enshittification per se, but it’s trending in that direction.

Look, sometimes you really do get what you pay for. This has long been true with Apple’s hardware products, devices that tend to be higher cost but also of higher quality than the competition. This has been the strategy for the company in the modern era, just as it was at its inception, when the expensive Apple II series of computers competed against much less expensive and more capable home computers from Atari, Commodore, and others. You paid more for the brand because you liked what it stood for. In the modern era, you can make a solid argument that you also get the quality you pay for.

But growth doesn’t happen by magic. At some point, even home runs like the iPhone slow and then stall, and so the strategy changes too. Apple first expanded the iPhone lineup to two models with a cheaper “unapologetically plastic” iPhone 5C that disappeared quickly and quietly. Then it started offering two models, one with a bigger screen and one with a smaller screen. Then there were Pro and non-Pro models too, each with bigger and smaller screen options. Apple would continue selling previous generation iPhones to satisfy the needs of more mainstream users and their pedestrian wallets. And then there was the SE, which was basically a previous generation iPhone but sold as new.

Today, we have the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17e. For some reason. We complain when Microsoft does this SKU dance with Office and Windows, but we celebrate it when Apple does it with the iPhone, iPad, and Mac? There are even multiple versions of the Apple Watch and Apple Pencil for some reason.

This type of thing rarely ends well because bringing a luxury brand to the masses is fraught with problems. On the one hand, selling products at volume is, of course, desirable. But on the other, the makers of these products threaten the permanent dissolution of the brand, with the reputation of a once-revered product line destroyed by the compromises that selling to the masses requires.

Apple is treading on dangerous ground with its cheapest products. The one exception, oddly, is the iPad: The base iPad starts at just $349, which isn’t cheap but is still reasonable given how much better it is than any of the Android competition. But all products are compromises, which explains why Apple claims that its cheap MacBook Neo is not one. To some degree, that’s fair. It’s not one compromise, it’s many compromises. Too many.

And talk about tilting the scales. Apple just introduced a new MacBook Air with a higher $1099 starting price, up $100, to help make the $599 and up MacBook Neo look even more attractive. But the MacBook Neo is a Chevy Cavalier in Cadillac Cimarron clothing, a reference at least some of you will get. It’s not a less expensive MacBook. It’s just a cheap MacBook that I feel could harm Apple more than help. It’s the iPhone 5C of Macs, the new Performa.

To be fair, anyone can compare specs and it’s easy to miss the point. There is obviously an emotional angle to consider, this understandable but foolish desire to get something for nothing or, more realistically, get great value of out a reasonably inexpensive product. I get all that. I know the history, and I feel like I think about this battle between emotion and logic when it comes to purchases more than many.

But there is also this related issue of death by a thousand cuts. If the MacBook Neo were one or two compromises shy of being a MacBook Air, I would feel differently about it. I might even celebrate it.

To be clear, I’m not worried about an A-series processor, at all, but there are far too many compromises here. And these are not the types of compromises I see in the low-end Snapdragon X-based laptops we now enjoy in the Windows laptop market. In fact, there are almost no compromises with those laptops. Ironic.

Specification comparisons are tough. Sometimes a set of components that looks weak on paper transforms into something better in real life. Everyone has different needs and wants. A feature that one person can’t live without may be unimportant to another. There’s no “winning” here, no right answer or objective victory everyone can live with. My opinions are, to some degree, unfair. I don’t have a MacBook Neo, for starters.

But compare we must.

Anyone can compare the MacBook Neo to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro right on Apple’s website, though doing so won’t tell you the full story. Missing from this comparison are some very important details that undermine the MacBook Neo value equation and the daily experience of using this laptop. That’s smart from a marketing perspective, but as a potential customer you have some work to do. Below, I list out the issues I see with the MacBook Neo. You may agree with some of them, but not all of them. And that’s fine. These are essentially opinions. But in your own list of what matters here and what doesn’t, all I ask is that you keep a tally. I think you may be surprised by how many compromises there are here.

Among them are:

Touch ID. It’s impossible to understand how Apple hasn’t brought its Face ID facial recognition system to any Macs, regardless of price. But the MacBook Neo doesn’t even include Touch ID fingerprint recognition capabilities unless you pony up for a $100 upgrade that also includes a storage upgrade from 256 GB to 512 GB. So the real starting price of a MacBook Neo is really $699, not $599.

Keyboard backlighting. Nothing screams compromise more than Apple not giving MacBook Neo users keyboard backlighting, even as an upgrade. This is a requirement for any laptop, a need not a want, and while there are some bizarre examples of Windows laptops without this feature, you can always get it as an option for $10 to $15 at most. The MacBook Air has terrific keyboard backlighting with an ambient light sensor. (“Just turn on a light” is not the answer, but you know that.)

No, 8 GB of RAM is not enough. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation in 2026, but that’s what Apple does to people’s brains. Some claim that 8 GB is enough for those who are just reading email, browsing the web, and doing light productivity work.  OK, sure. But that’s not what people do with a laptop, including those making this claim, it’s what they do on a phone or tablet. Laptops are for work, for multitasking, for running Office alongside Chrome and Mail and whatever else, and that needs RAM. Mobile platforms like Android and iOS can get by with less, but 16 GB is the minimum for any Mac/PC usage today. For power users like you and me, it’s closer to 32 GB.

256 GB of storage is not enough either. When I bought my MacBook Air M3 almost two years ago, I didn’t just upgrade the RAM (in this case to 24 GB), I also upgraded the storage to 512 GB from what was at the time a base 256 GB. Which was not enough then and is not enough now. Were I buying a MacBook Air today, I’d go with 1 TB of storage, as I routinely discover that 512 GB is not enough for my needs, Mac or PC. 2 TB would be even better. Again, this is a laptop, not a consumption device. And this storage is not expandable or replaceable, as is the case with modern Windows laptops, including low-end Snapdragon X-based models.

Size matters. I will never understand how the personal computing industry transitioned into a space in which “cheap,” low-end, and entry-level devices somehow equate to small screens. For many years, and probably today, many of the cheapest PC laptops were 16-inch monsters, both big and heavy, and while I’m not claiming any of them were any good, at least there were screen size choices. Today, the cheapest phones from Apple, Google, and Samsung all have the smallest displays those companies make. And so it is with the MacBook Neo, the smallest, least impressive screen that Apple provides in a laptop. That’s not the case with the iPad—the iPad Mini is more expensive than the base iPad despite its smaller display—and it’s unclear why Apple can’t provide two screen sizes in the MacBook Neo. Except that it is clear: This is a cheap device made as cheaply as possible. This is about Apple’s costs, not the value you receive.

Relatively thick and heavy. Speaking of cheap, the MacBook Neo somehow manages to be notably thicker than the MacBook Air—0.50 inches vs. 0.44 inches—and it weighs the same 2.7 pounds as the 13.6-inch MacBook Air despite having a slightly smaller display and a much smaller (36.5 watt-hour vs. 53.8 watt-hour) battery. This, at least, is to be expected from a less expensive product. (And to be fair, the HP OmniBook 5 I love is 0.52 inches thick.)

USB ports from the past. One of my enduring frustrations in reviewing over 20 laptops every year is that PC makers provide multiple USB ports, all with different specifications and capabilities. Apple never does this, well, until now, that is. The MacBook Neo has two Type-C ports, but neither is Thunderbolt of any kind and both are different, cheap, and inexcusable: One is in a freaking USB 2.0 port with just 480 Mbps of data transfer speed, and the other is “USB 3.0”, meaning it’s 10 Gbps. What is this thing, a netbook?

Charging from the past. The MacBook Neo charges at just 20 watts, like a low-end smartphone, whereas the MacBook Air can charge at up to 70 watts, with the base power adapter being a 40-watt mini-brick. Also, the MacBook Neo has no MagSafe, another cost-cutting measure, so you’re stuck with USB-C and will be using up one of its two ports for power. I’m sure Apple clearly labels the ports. But I kid.

A webcam from the past. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro both feature terrific 12 MP Center Stage webcams. The Neo? A budget bin Full HD (1080p) unit like those found in cheap Windows laptops. Suffice to say that the speakers and microphones also fall well short of what a MacBook Air buyer gets.

A physical touchpad from the past. While the other MacBooks feature what is arguably the industry’s best haptic touchpad, Apple went to the old parts bin again for the mechanical touchpad it uses in the Neo. I’m sure it’s OK. But this is yet another area where it cut corners.

Given all this, what’s the real price difference—the “value” difference—between the MacBook Neo and the base MacBook Air? I put it at $300. It’s $300 because the base MacBook Air has 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, both of which are (storage) or would be (RAM) $100 upgrades. And when you view the differences between these laptops in that light, the difference you pay for a MacBook Air isn’t just justified, it’s a no-brainer. It’s the difference between a good experience and a frustrating experience.

Put another way, the base MacBook Air has almost no compromises, assuming you can overlook the Face ID thing and can stand using macOS. But the MacBook Neo is nothing but compromises. And while some of those compromises are subjective and will impact different people to different degrees, some of them are literal, objective problems that will impact all users..

Some may point out that they don’t have $1099 to spend on a laptop. To which I have a few replies.

Consider a Snapdragon X-based Windows laptop instead, being the first. But I’m curious about this market for those who are “just reading email, browsing the web, and doing light productivity work” and why any of that requires a laptop. That same $599 or $699 will get you a MacBook Air, which is overkill for most. Or a base iPad with a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil with money to spare. You either need a laptop or you don’t. Are you so rich that you can afford secondary laptops for those light use cases? Seriously?

But really, just do the math. You can’t afford a $1099 laptop? Can you afford $91.58 a month for one year, the price Apple will charge you to split up the payment? (A MacBook Neo starts at $49.91 per month for one year, for comparison’s sake.) How about a refurbished MacBook Air? Prices start at just $759, just $60 more than a “real” MacBook Neo. I would seriously consider starting there.

Know this. There is no such thing as a good $500 laptop. But there is great value in the $600 to $800 space, and truly terrific laptops to be had for a few hundred dollars more. The appeal of the MacBook Neo is simple, it’s all about that starting price, the thing that gets a customer in the door. But if you can put aside the reality distortion field long enough to put the credit card back in your wallet, you will see some clarity emerge.

And what that clarity tells us is that you do have some good choices if you want to buy an Apple product for a reasonable price. The MacBook Neo is cheap, yes. But you could get a MacBook Air if you need a laptop, new or refurbished. And an iPad if you do not. With apologies to Jobs, no question has ever arisen if there’s room for something else in between. There is not, at least not with all these compromises.