Apple announced the MacBook Neo two days ago. $599. iPhone chip. Four colors including "citrus" yellow. Ships March 11.

I'm not an Apple user but I've been following rumors for a while. With the specs officially out, I have thoughts. Not all of them are positive.

What it actually is

MacBook Neo is the cheapest laptop Apple has ever sold. At $599 - or $499 if you're a student - that's great.

What sucks: A18 Pro chip instead of an M-series chip. A18 Pro is the same chip that's in the iPhone 16 Pro. It's definitely fast, but not as fast as the M4 in the MacBook Air. It's also locked to 8GB RAM with no room for an upgrade.

Personally, I think smartphones are very powerful. Before I bought my laptop, I used to wire up a keyboard (with an OTG cables) to my phone. I think having a dedicated desktop environment when you connect your phone to a display (Dex feature on Samsung phones) is very cool. That should be standard on all phones. The chips on flagship phones today are certainly as capable as laptops from back in the day.

I think of the macbook Neo as basically a mac-sized iPhone with a keyboard. Pretty cool if you think about it.

What works

Not everybody out there is fine-tuning models. A18 pro handles browsing, light editing, calls and whatever it is that most people are doing.

I think macbooks have amazing build quality- you're still getting a 13-inch retina display on an Aluminium device. It's the kind of device I'd get my parents without thinking.

It also has no keyboard backlight, but honestly, I touch-type, so it doesn't bother me. Personally, I'd prefer if keyboards came with no markings haha.

My concerns

Not a Force Touch trackpad. It's not what's on the air or the pro.

8GB RAM sucks. And not being able to upgrade sucks even more. I hate brands cutting corners on RAM. 16GB should be the standard on this, and the 4060 cards.

Two USB-C ports, and one of them is USB 2. The left port is USB 3 DisplayPort. The right one is USB 2. That means you can connect one display, and the second port is for charging. No MagSafe.

500 nits, no true tone or P3. It's not what's on the air or the pro. But probably fine.

Who should buy this

Yes: Students. Or if you had a chromebook and liked it. Anyone who's broke. Parents buying a laptop for kids. Adults buying laptop for their parents.

No: Devs. Anyone running Docker. Anyone doing ML work. Anyone who edits video.

For ML?

I read the newsroom post by Apple, and it glosses over this part. A18 Pro and M-series chips share the same architecture, but they're not the same thing. M chips have way more memory bandwidth, more GPU cores, and can scale up to 16, 32, 64, 128GB of unified memory. The A18 Pro is capped at 8GB. And you cannot upgrade it.

Running a 7B or 13B locally, doing embeddings, calling API, this would work as A series supports MLX. But you won't be able to run anything quantized above Q4, and the 8GB is a serious concern for big models. If you're serious, look at the M4 pro.

The 16-core neural engine is marketed as an AI feature. It's probably for on-device summarization, photo effects, live translation. I'm quite sure it won't handle local model training or research. The "AI" in the Neo's marketing and the "AI" in ML are very different things.

Thoughts

MacBook Air just went up $100 to $1,099. The 16-inch M5 Pro Max went up to $3,599. It seems Apple is widening the gap between two ends of the market. Neo competes directly with chromebooks while running desktop OS and Apple silicon.

It's interesting.

It's colorful- I'll give them that.

MacBook Neo starts at $599, ships March 11. You might be able to get discounts. Prices accurate as of March