Apple unveils all-new MacBook Neo with A18 Pro processor, 8GB unified memory, 16-hour battery life, and a US$599 starting price

When was the last ihone without touch id? Iphone <5s!
But even then, mac mini needs the corresponding touchID keyboard so why not, same for the mac studio and iMac, and the mac pro but this is the abandoned child nobody cares about :)
No magsafe charger, but this was quite expected.
This will be a great sale and actually the little brother of the mac mini for the average consumer, apple will make good money with it.
Do we agree that it's still 100% macos under the hood though? No weird limitation but the CPU?
Now the Air could feel redundant, but I think the really redundant model is the macbook pro m5 non pro, as pros and max? or just the max? have brand new cores to replace the efficiency ones. So maybe the air will still keep its weird market?
I really feel that the this new macbook will be a banger this year especially considering how microslop has lost all social permition for, well, pretty much everything? windows 11 becoming so bad that more laptop companies ship them with linux distros instead, steamos rising, and the rampocalipse.
I don't need this at all and have the complete opposite profile, plus have an m2 pro already , but I feel this will be great! And a very nice pricing.

OK, as a formal sighted person what blank are those colors? Is citras orange? or lemon? Did someone created a color behind my back? Apple is nuts. Nice price, if I could use it, I would get it but heard that VO is not great in the MAC and do not want the headache. Long live cats and citras.

Sorry for misspelling citrus. Long live cats. At lease I did not misspell cats.

I think this will be a good MacBook, especially for someone who wants to start out with learning the Mac. It can also be good for those who aren’t planning to use it for heavier computer tasks, and they’d rather have a cheaper alternative.

Better than an iPad. Sad that I am a windows person. Long live you know who.

My honest thoughts, ok, but not great.
If this is your first MacBook, I would give it a go. Nice storage, and decent battery life.
However, if you already have an m series, and your. Happy with it, as I am with my m1, I would stick with what you have.

My concern would be how long it will last and how so call Siri 2.0 would work. If I knew how to use VO on a mac be cool Have an iPad 9 and it is OK but is not great with VO and slim foleo keyboard from logitech.

This is going to be fabulous for those just starting out or you do not need the power of the Macbook Air/Pro. I'm currently happy with my M2 Macbook Air, and I will stick with it until its final breath lol. But my next one? Who knows; could be whatever generation Neo around at time of purchase lol. Despite the limitations, you can't grumble given the price. I say 10 out of 10 if all goes well with the product!

I think is better than an iPad. Will think about it, my iPad 9 is getting old and using iOS 26.4 beta is slow. Long live cats. PS my concern would be learning how to use VO with it.

the Mac nobody asked for with crippled specs from day one. THey'd be better off putting the R&D budget into controlling more of their supply chain, allowing them to reduce the price of existing models. If they truly cared so deeply about the environment, they wouldn't purposely produce eWaste like this which will be limited now and useless in a year or 2.

I'd be all over this if my M1 Air with 16GB of RAM was no longer going strong, and may actually get next year's model if apple stops supporting the M1 on macOS 27 Deep Tahoe or whatever they decide to call the stable Tahoe. The price point makes it almost discardable, the kind of computer that I could give away to people temporarily working for me without concerning myself with writing it off due to it getting stolen or damaged.

OK, all I see my self getting it when it goes to amazon and they have a nice deal. Is learning VO on the mac easy or you need to learn more. Have iPad 9 and is OK but can not use it with a keyboard. VO does not work well if you use a external keyboard. Long live kitties.

I wouldn't call this e-waste. The A18 should be decent for a while, and if we're going by the e-waste philosophy, all these products will become e-waste eventually. The Intel Macs are the first to go this year. Of course none of these companies care about the environment as long as they're making money, but we already knew that.

This is great, but it’s not really something I’m interested in. I don’t really want to play with a Mac mainly because of everything that I’ve heard on here about their compatibility with their own screen reader and just the different issues people are having with them. Yeah I definitely wanna know what those colors mean to know why they can’t just call in pink white black whatever they are or they have to be blush and citrus and whatever else they said. You’re not giving it much of a storage capacity. As much storage in these things as there in the phone. I already have a 512 gig iPhone 15. But I hope whoever gets these enjoys them.

Found out. Citrus is pink, the other is pale yellow green. If you never seen, it is not a nice color. Pink well is a girly color. Long live cats. PS Bella was gray and white.

"I was hoping for a true 12-inch MacBook replacement, but this is basically a 13.6-inch Air in disguise. Since the footprint and weight are so similar, it doesn't really fill a gap for me."

Amen. You are 100% right of course. They could have done it so well by putting like the m2 or m1, with 16gb ram at least, then I could have almost forgiven the storage. But yes, the first thing I thought was 8gb of ram in 2026? It was already bad in 2020 before the AI slop era.
They only pretend to care about the environment enough so the left wing is happy, and with how trump and the environment go they could even stop that soon. Apple are the worse company with enough budget to do greenwash at scale, and succeed because we only have paid youtuber desguised as jurnalist nowadays... Louis Rossmann must be screaming now, assuming he haven't already stopped following whatever apple does post apple silicon era.

Look. If my 14-inch 10-core m1 pro macbook pro had issues with safari, finder, and just about every app that uses more than 1 gb of ram, goes not responding... this is a fubar product from day one. I love the idea. but again, 8 gb of ram in 2026? Look, I can buy a snapdragon x plus windows laptop with double the ram for roughly the same price, and get better performance. But yet again, I buy off ebay. So...

If not happy, why are using apple? Left and right please no politics in here. Apple is just apple. Like the song says is all about the money. Long live kitties.

as microslop is no longer an option for me personally :) they have usable enough accessibility on their desktop os so...

This is an excellent option. Nice job Apple

the last mac i used was a macbook air 11 inch. if voiceover is still "not responding" in 2026 with apps then glad not using as a daily driver.

to be fair though, i haven't kept updated with the latest mac innovations.

On my machine at least. In fact it's more stable concerning this particular horrible problem than sequoia ever was imo.

Students just entering college, with 20/20 vision. Thank you, that is all.

I agree about the RAM and storage being too low, especially since it looks like all M5 machines are going to start with 512 GB storage and 16 GB RAM.
They could have done better, but this product is geared at the casual user. Apple has never to my knowledge sold a laptop this cheap before, so it'll be interesting to see how it does. It's clear they cut a lot of corners, and I think the Mac mini at the same price is a much better deal. Then again, it comes down to choosing a laptop over a desktop, and if portability is important to you, this seems like a decent option if you're on a budget, at least as much as you can get with Apple.

This might be a very good machine for controlling a powerful desktop computer you have at home. When you are away from home, you could use it for web browsing and documents and other things that work well on this machine, and for things where you need more power, you could connect to your home desktop with Remote Incident Manager or another solution. The price makes this appealing as well as the long battery life for a laptop.

This looks just for basic use. Long live cats.

I wonder if this machine will have an open bootloader just like the M-series Macs, or will it be locked just like iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches? I really hope to one day natively run Windows for ARM or Arch Linux ARM on these computers, especially once Apple deems them e-waste. I'm avoiding Asahi like the plague because it looks like it's Wayland only, and the less I say about Wayland, GNOME, KDE Plasma, etc, the better.

"Found out. Citrus is pink, the other is pale yellow green. If you never seen, it is not a nice color. Pink well is a girly color."

Blush is fairly pink in the real world.
Citrus can be pale yellow-green, like when a lime is becoming ripe. The green limes you get at the store aren't ripe. In the real world, of course.
I have no idea why Apple would call citrus pink, unless they are talking about the inside of a grapefruit.
Pink can be a men's color, if one's skin tone is suited for it, kind of like how some people should never wear orange...

I was going to ask if the unified memory caused issues with AI models and image generation, but I probably don't know what I'm asking.

Reminds me of yellow color having sex with a lemon color and having a kid with pale yellow green. I recall the color it was never good to see. Nuts. Long live cats.

yeah I ain't touching mac before they improve Voice Over LOL, feels like it is bearly usable for my use cases. I would consider if it is as smooth as NVDA.

I am genuinely interested in this new Mac, and am keen to learn how the processor stacks up against the M Series Chips.
Hoping for some good reviews after the product actually hits the market.

Kudos to Apple for finally adding a more affordable option for more price conscious consumers who'd like a Mac but don't want to pay $1,000+ to get one. I'm impressed they actually decided to offer a $600 model that is fully functional, just trimming out some of the nice to have features like Touch ID and MagSafe.
the processor is an A series chip, but apparently its performance is somewhere between an M1 and M2 processor, particularly on single core tasks like web browsing, writing, and messaging, which is what most people buying this machine will be concerned with.
As for VO, the last time I had the "Not Responding" problems was when I was still using an Intel based MacBook Air. When I upgraded to the M2 Air with 8 GB of memory, those problems went away and have never returned. I'm currently running the latest version of Sequoia, and it's fast, fluid, and no issues, thankfully. This makes me think the base model Neo should be fine for most users too.
I give Apple credit here for offering an entry level model at last that I can recommend to Windows users who'd like to have a Mac, but can't afford over $1,000 to get one. These people have not had an option before, and at a little more than half the price of the entry level MacBook Air, the Neo seems like an amazing value.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Well done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As others have said, this looks like a fantastic device for those starting out with the Mac or the casual users who don't necessarily need a powerful machine. If you're mainly browsing the web, responding to emails, working with basic documents etc this will do you just fine. With many apps being web and cloud-based nowadays, the power on the machine itself doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Having said that, for the same price you can either have the new iPad Air with the M4 processer and an extra 4GB of RAM, so a better deal from a hardware perspective, but iPadOS is far more limited than MacOS. Or, you could have this new Mac which runs full MacOS but slightly worse hardware.

What this Mac shows is that the M4 chips are capable of running iPadOS, and the A18 processer is capable of running MacOS, so why not merge the two together? I'm seeing much less point in iPadOS lately, especially now we know that the A series (or at least the A18) can run MacOS so it's not a hardware limitation.

It's a fantastic price for a Mac and I must admit I'm tempted, but it does add more confusion to Apple's iPad and Mac lineup in my opinion.

These low-end devices aren't for me and they probably aren't for most of the regular technology enthusiasts on this forum.

However, according to media reports, they may be intended for large-scale deployments in primary and secondary schools or work environments in which only basic performance is required, for example, interacting with Web applications or performing light office tasks.

Hundreds of them could be deployed quite easily and at a reasonable per-unit cost. They would be compatible with other Apple devices in the environment as well (i.e., offering Continuity features and supporting organization-wide administration functionality).

As Zach M said above, on my M2 Pro Max with 32gb I regularly get not responding, or VoiceOver clearly having to take the odd siesta from time to time, I am not massively convinced that last year's iPhone will do a better job.

It sounds like it should be closer to an iPad in terms of use cases. I suppose if you want a simple machine that you are going to type on a lot and don't care about a touch screen then maybe this would be a good alternative to the iPad.

I'm just not convinced about how well VoiceOver will perform. I will be curious to know though.

Are the iPhone chipsets also ARM? How different are they from the M series? Will apps that run natively on the Mac have to do anything to work with this one?

As Zach M said above, on my M2 Pro Max with 32gb I regularly get not responding, or VoiceOver clearly having to take the odd siesta from time to time, I am not massively convinced that last year's iPhone will do a better job.

This is clearly not a macOS problem in my experience. There may be other things slowing your computer down there, since my 16GB M1 MacBook Air is still holding up fine on macOS 26.3, and for normal tasks I don't even notice much of a difference compared to the 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio that I'm using to type this comment.

You are probably right that it is more my specific circumstances causing the problem. I do have quite a lot of stuff running at once, and the web apps that tend to cause Safari issues like Jira are maybe not mainstream. I find it goes in waves - sometimes Safari just won't get a grip, and I'll open up ChatGPT web app and it'll be struggling and so will everything else. But other times it's not so bad.

So yes maybe you are right, maybe that isn't a good way to judge this Mac which obviously has a different target audience to me.

And I'm not on Tahoe so obviously not benefitting from all the optimisations they've no doubt added. (OK maybe a touch of sarcasm there.)

Do you know how similar the architectures of an A series and M series chipset are?

As far as I can tell, the A chips are scaled-down versions of the M ones. They're designed for smaller devices like the iPhone, but they're still ARM under the hood. iOS is essentially a stripped-down version of macOS with many many many artificial limitations.

Don't listen to anything I'll write, just hear it and do your own research.
TLDR from what I understand the a series is based on arm and the m series is an itteration of the a series with some added things and maybe subtle architectural differences. Yes they're all arm.

Request Applevis Podcast guys to do a demonstration + review of this Macbook neo.
Specifically, I would love to know how VO behaves, if there's any difference/slowness while loading apps, if Garageband and logic pro might work smoothly, and, if there's any difference in boot time.
Also, if this doesn't have the fingerprint thing, would Apple pay and such features work?

From what I gather, there are no meaningful architectural differences between an M-series chip and an A-series chip of the same generation as far as software is concerned, it's just performance and memory, since they are both pretty standard ARM implementations as Apple doesn't deviate much from the specifications, and when they do implement extensions, they tend to do it across the board, so all chips from the same generation get the same extensions.

For example with the move to ARMv9 on the M4 and A18,, Apple also replaced their private AMX instruction set which accelerates CPU-bound matrix calculations, with ARM's SME instruction set which from what I heard is highly influenced by Apple's design of AMX, but I never learned AMX myself so I'm not talking from personal experience, although I have experience with ARM's SME, and its inclusion on the M4 was one of the reasons why I opted for this 128GB M4 Max instead of the apex 512GB M3 Ultra, other than the huge price difference, of course. As for their GPU and neural engine, as far as I know those are totally private, like AMX was, meaning there's absolutely no public documentation about their respective instruction sets, nor even an intermediate language like SPIR-V from Vulkan or PTX from CUDA, so I have no opinion about that, as from my perspective, Metal and CoreML are the lowest possible GPU and neural engine abstraction levels that I can get using public frameworks.

So perhaps a dumb question here: I've seen the base Neo doesn't have Touch ID, and it does not appear to have a FaceID camera. And I've not seen any article cover security. So am I right that you will have to type your pin every time you open the lid or leave standby?
I know this is a first world problem, but would make it marginally less friendly than an iPad or iPhone to keep as the couch texter. Not sure $100 more to get TouchID is worht it, but I do tend to get annoyed when I want to be logged in right now. Thinking out loud, if yu follow the patter of the iPhone 17e taking care of some of the quibbles the 16e left out that didn't hardly make sense like MagSafe, I would venture the next Neo version will be the winner.

For 100$ extra you can get it. You can use your other devices to unlock such as watch or phone. Similar when you unlock phone and watch is also. However is not consistent. Long live cats.

If you have an Apple Watch, that's a non-issue since you can just configure macOS to get the authentication wall out of the way as soon as you sit down in front of your Mac. For TouchID, the stand-alone Magic Keyboards are likely to also work, but they are obviously not as comfortable as a built-in TouchID sensor or just getting authenticated by the watch.

To a point yes, however you have to from time to time I think its 48 hours if memory serves, you'll have to enter your password to reinable touch id and unlocking with apple watch which not a big deal but its not just enter password once and your set, but again not a big deal as this doesn't happen too much, although the ability to turn off the 48 hours password prompt would be nice but we'll see.

I'm very curious to see what newer generations of the Neo offer. I always say never purchase first generation anything, because the subsequent versions will be much better. Hopefully we get more RAM options, a removable battery to comply with the new EU legislation that should begin in 2027, etc.

As we say in Chicago, wait until next year. We say that about our sports tean. Long live cats.

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/macbook-neo-performance?utm_source=newsletters.cultofmac.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=neo-is-no-netbook&_bhlid=de8a21ac7631ea4abec9874f6c96e0679ab22439