Apple announces MacBook Neo, its most affordable laptop ever

For years, the cheapest way into the Mac lineup was a $999 laptop. On Wednesday, Apple cut that price nearly in half.

The company unveiled the MacBook Neo, a colorful, lightweight laptop powered by an iPhone-grade chip that is the company’s most affordable laptop ever.

The launch caps a three-day hardware blitz that has already seen refreshes to the iPhone 17e, iPad Air, and the entire MacBook Pro line.

Starting at $599, the MacBook Neo is Apple’s first dedicated budget Mac in more than a decade, and its clearest attempt yet to challenge Google Chromebooks and entry-level Windows machines that dominate classrooms and first-time buyer markets.

“There is simply no other laptop like it,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, in a statement.

The laptop features a 13-inch display, a lightweight metal body that comes in at 2.7 pounds and a colorful finish that gives it a more approachable, consumer-friendly look than the rest of Apple’s notebook lineup.

It offers up to 500 nits of brightness — on par with the MacBook Air — along with two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. The base model comes with 256 gigabytes of storage, while a version priced $100 higher doubles that capacity and adds Touch ID.

Apple is also offering education discounts.

The MacBook Neo goes up for preorder on Wednesday and will be available starting March 11. Apple said it delivers up to 16 hours of battery life, and it comes in indigo, blush, citrus and silver, with dual side-firing speakers. The MacBook Air has 18 hours of battery life.

Apple’s low-cost MacBook was already an open secret by the time it launched.

On Tuesday, Apple briefly posted a regulatory filing for the device — Model A3404 — to its European Union compliance page before pulling it down, effectively confirming what had already been widely expected: a lower-cost MacBook was coming.

Unlike the MacBook Air and Pro, which run on Apple’s M-series processors, the Neo uses the A18 Pro chip — the same family of silicon that powers the iPhone. That gives Apple room to push the price dramatically lower, even if it comes with less processing power than the rest of the Mac lineup.

Even though it runs on an iPhone-class chip, the Neo still uses the full macOS operating system found across Apple’s laptop lineup.

Throughout the week, Apple has been pitching faster chips, more memory, and Apple Intelligence pushed deeper across its lineup, including lower-cost devices.

The Neo brings that same approach to a part of the market Apple has mostly ceded for years — students, budget-conscious households and the many iPhone users who have never owned a Mac.

The company said the device can run artificial intelligence tasks up to three times faster than PC laptops.

Mac revenue fell nearly 7% to $8.39 billion in the holiday quarter from a year earlier, missing analyst expectations for roughly $9 billion in sales. The pressure is coming at the same time Apple is raising prices on the rest of its laptop lineup.

On Tuesday, MacBook Air prices rose by $100, with the 13-inch M5 model now starting at $1,099, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max climbed $400 to $3,899.