Apple's new MacBook Neo!

the chosen one?

Apple released the MacBook Neo today.

It’s an affordable option for consumers, targeting the education and entry-level markets. Here are the main points to know:

• It’s powered by the A18 Pro chip, the same chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro!

  • technically it has one less GPU core than the 16 Pro, making it slightly worse.

  • Here are the benchmarks, it performs relatively well on single-threaded tasks but only marginally better than the 6 year old M1 chip on multi-core tasks.

    

    

  • The tasks most users will care about (web browsing, responsiveness, gaming) are mostly single-threaded, so this isn’t a big concern!

  • Also regarding memory, it comes with a fixed 8gb of RAM.

• It has a Retina display and TouchID

  • Retina is basically Apple’s way of saying the resolution of their screens is high enough where the individual pixels cannot be discerned at normal viewing distances. The screen only has a peak brightness of 500 nits (most phones have a peak of 1000 nits and the scale is logarithmic, i.e. 1000 nits is actually perceived as ~26-40% brighter than 500).

  • These are both definitely big pluses!

• IO

  • The MacBook Neo only has 2 USB C ports and a headphone jack.

  • The USB C ports are also slow, one is a USB 3 port (5 Gbps data transfer) and the other is USB 2 (480 Mbps data transfer).

  • The lack of extra ports and IO is personally a deal breaker, I dislike being forced to carry a USB hub in order to make the most of my device.

• Price:

  • The Neo starts at $599 USD ($899 AUD), almost half of the MacBook Air at $1099 USD.

  • This is a massive boon for consumers, and will help a lot more people get into the Apple ecosystem. I expect this to be especially big with students!

All in all, I like this new release and I’m looking forward to seeing future updates to this new line of MacBook!