The Neo was introduced by Apple at the beginning of March, 2026. By far the least expensive MacBook, it starts at $599 ($499 for Education) with a single upgrade for another $100 that brings Touch ID and a storage upgrade from 256G to 512G.

It runs the standard MacOS (26-something) on an A18 Pro processor which was used in the iPhone 16 Pro (introduced in 2024) along with 8G of RAM. It only has 2 USB ports, one of which must be used for charging. And only 1 of them is the newer USB3 standard which allows truly fast data transfer. The other port uses the older, USB2 standard which limits data transfers to 480MB/sec.

While you might dismiss the Neo as a dumbed-down MacBook, unless you do some heavy graphics or video work it seems to be quite capable (see https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-macbook-neo-review/). It’s positioned against Chromebooks but, given that a Chromebook can only run one app: Google’s Chrome browser, it doesn’t feel like a fair comparison — the Neo is a full-on MacBook that can run pretty much any Mac application. Sure, a Chromebook can run Android apps and even run Linux in a virtual machine which is always available running inside ChromeOS so, I guess, in some ways it’s a fair comparison but I can’t help but feel that the Neo is, overall, a better deal if you can operate in the Apple ecosystem.

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