MacBook Neo
The sub-$1,000 MacBook exists, and it’s called Neo. I don’t care for the name (although I didn’t like “Air” at first, either), but aside from that I love the product.
How long have folks been asking Apple for a less costly laptop? Easily since the netbook era of the mid 2000s. Now that Apple’s silicon is so good, they can do it. I have no doubt the A18 Pro will be sufficient for the folks buying this computer.
I believe the right way to view this laptop is by comparing it to the other sub-$1,000 laptop Apple has quietly been selling for the last few years: the $649 Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air.
Benchmark sites put the overall performance between the M1 and A18 Pro as basically a wash, meaning the Neo is effectively an M1-era MacBook Air (albeit on a newer SoC) in a refreshed chassis. That’s great! The M1 MacBook Air is still an amazing machine. It’s easy to forget that the first generation of Apple Silicon Macs were leaps ahead of their predecessors. My wife still uses an M1 MacBook Air – with 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD, the same configuration as the base Neo – and it’s still astonishingly fast.
I think we’re going to see a lot of MacBook Neos in the wild.