I don’t normally review products that I have not purchased and have never touched. However, I feel that MacBook Neo is worthy of comment, because it has the potential to be one of the most important Macs in history. I say this without intention to exaggerate. Although MacBook Neo is a subpar Mac technically, due to a number of design compromises, a Mac that I would never purchase for myself, its price is unprecedented, the least expensive laptop that Apple has ever produced. MacBook Neo is an entry-level machine that could bring many, perhaps millions of new customers to the Mac platform who previously found Macs to be out of their price range. From my admittedly self-centered perspective as a Mac developer, I consider MacBook Neo a welcome addition to Apple’s product lineup, and while I may quibble about some design compromises, I don’t consider them fatal, and I recognize Apple’s difficulty in pushing down the cost of the machine. I just hope that price-conscious MacBook Neo buyers are not total cheapskates in paying for third-party software…
Of course my first thought was of The Matrix. MacBook Morpheus, anyone? My opinion is that MacBook Neo is a dumb name that won’t age well. The prefix neo, used by Apple as a suffix, literally means “new.” So the new MacBook is effectively named MacBook New. How imaginative! The problem is that MacBook Neo, if the product lasts, will remain new for only a short time. In five years, will it still be called Neo? Does that make sense?
Before MacBook Neo, Apple laptop naming made sense: MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The “Air” part seemed unnecessary, redundant, and Apple could have called it simply “MacBook,” a name Apple has used in the past, but in any case there was a clear distinction between the pro and non-pro models. Now there’s Air, Neo, and Pro, which is confusing. Worse, the 13-inch MacBook Air is the same weight as MacBook Neo, which belies the “Air” label. MacBook naming has become almost as bad as iPad naming, which I’ll never understand. iPad, iPad Air, iPad mini, and iPad Pro? WTF do those even mean? The names are practically useless to consumers.
$599 USD, $499 USD for education. I have no complaints. I’m not an expert about the overall market, but the MacBook Neo price seems quite competitive to me.
The base model MacBook Neo has only 8 GB of RAM, which has drawn some criticism, but my M1 Mac mini has only 8 GB of RAM, and its performance always seemed fine, so I don’t think the specs will be a problem for consumers. The people who talk about running memory-hungry developer tools such as Xcode on a MacBook Neo are missing the point: this Mac is not for you! There is a laptop for you, clearly identified by the “Pro” in its name.
Touch ID is $100 extra. I think Touch ID is nice to have but not essential, so if Touch ID truly costs that much for Apple to add, the design compromise for a lower price is justified. On the other hand, macOS and Apple services have far too many password prompts nowadays. I wish that Apple would do something to remedy that situation, which reminds one of when Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads ridiculed Windows Vista for permission requests.
MacBook Neo has two USB ports, one USB 3 and the other USB 2. By itself, that’s an acceptable compromise for a bargain-basement laptop. Unfortunately, the ports are not labeled and look identical. That’s unacceptable. How much could it cost Apple to label the ports in some way?? I’m still peeved about the confusing DFU port situation that affects external disks plugged into my MacBook Pro.
Tahoe is a terrible introduction to the Mac platform, a demonstration of how not to design a user interface. I’ve already criticized macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass, which I’ve unfondly nicknamed Liquid Crass, multiple times on this blog. I can’t imagine that blurry text and controls are a selling point for Macs on a showroom floor. I used to recommend buying a Mac to everyone, but now I’m almost embarrassed about that; I don’t want to be called on to justify my previous recommendations. Potential switchers must roll their eyes and wonder what we were fussing about all along.
I’ve never been a fan of iPad, because it runs the same vendor-locked anti-consumer operating system as iPhone. I do sell software for iPhone and iPad, which is roughly half my total income, so I did buy an iPad for testing my software—a plain “iPad,” the cheapest model—but I rarely have a personal use for iPad, except reading the occasional ebook (I prefer paper books). MacBook Neo, with a dramatically lower price, has the potential to cut into the iPad market, particularly for iPad Pro, and as far as I’m concerned, that would be a positive result.
Apple stopped reporting unit sales in its quarterly financial results way back in 2019. The last unit sales figures we have, from Q4 2018, showed that the Average Selling Price was $422 for iPad and $1399 for Mac, a huge difference that was undoubtedly a factor in the iPad’s popularity, 1.8x the unit sales of Mac. Bringing down the ASP of Mac should help the Mac compete not only externally with Windows laptops but also internally with iPads.