Apple debuts all-new MacBook Neo, starting at $599.

A very low entry price, and even lower at $499 with education pricing. The main specs:

• Powered by A18 Pro, the same chip in iPhone 16 Pro, except with one less GPU core.

• You can only get 8GB of RAM, which is a bummer, but makes sense for the target audience.

• Base storage of 256GB.

• For $100 extra, you get double the storage and Touch ID. Totally worth the $100, which could even be a wash when sales start happening. If I were a betting man, I would assume the base model comes with a single NAND 256GB chip instead of dual NAND 128GB chips. You would get extra performance if you had dual 128GB chips since you have more “lanes” for data transfer and memory swap, but since this is the budget MacBook, it’s hard to tell until someone does a teardown.

• Side firing stereo speakers - they sound promising (haha), and Apple does a good job of giving decent audio even in budget products.

• No MagSafe 3 - totally expected and I barely use it on my wife’s 14-inch M1 Pro.

• Two USB-C ports - a plus since I was expecting a single port. Supports one 4K display alongside the Neo’s display.

• Four colors:

  • Silver

  • Blush (light pink),

  • Citrus (excess vitamin intake piss yellow),

  • Indigo

  No backlit keyboard, but you do get color matching keycaps, which could be problematic in dark environments.

Full specs comparing the two models. I’ll be testing the base model which matches my M1 Air in terms of memory and RAM, so we’ll see if the performance at least matches my M1.

In all fairness, I’ve been happy with 8GB of RAM on my M1 Air, and for people who only use stock apps and maybe Chrome or Firefox, this will be a beast.

The only unanswered question on my mind - can you open the lid with one finger?