The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.
I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.
My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year
I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.
The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.
If they don't make this product at this pricepoint, a competitor does and that also cannibalizes potential higher sku macbook sales to a degree. Every chromebook sold is a potential macbook neo customer and apple let google eat their lunch for years.
Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing. Nobody knows how to make things properly. Here in the UK you won't even find competent sheet metal fabricator (except for military or when you have more money than sense, but then whatever you want to sell will be dead in the water because of unaffordability).
I would happily buy a laptop with medium specs but apple build quality. I don't know if the Neo's build quality is on par with their other laptops but if it is it's probably my next laptop.
I would rather own a used MacBook AIR than a new MacBook Neo. I usually don't like used computers but I just can't stand the anxiety of having to only have 8Gb RAM. Sure, it swaps, it compresses memory etc.. but still.
It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)
I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)
The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.
I would like to know how these are on XCode - would love to have the cheapest/most lightweight possible way to build iOS apps (derived from some cross-platform builder like Expo/Lynx/Dioxus) since I have no other use for MacOS.
Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.
I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses.
It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.
The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.
Agree. I could afford "better" but the Neo suits my needs perfectly and I don't like expensive laptops that are prone to damage and theft. Dollar for dollar it is the best computer I've ever bought.
I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.
Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.
Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose.
"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.
With 12GB it's a seriously cool offering. I actually know 8GB works as well, and I've seen people on MacBook Airs with 50 tabs open, full IDE's and breezing. But I still would want at least 4GB more to be on the safe side.
Not surprising. I've been looking at potentially getting one for my mother. Her last Windows 10 laptop is pretty long in the tooth, and there's no way in hell I'm getting her one with Windows 11 on it.
The Neo seems to fill the same niche that the Chromebook once did, and, since she's already in the Apple ecosystem due to her iPhone, an "Apple Chromebook" seems like an attractive proposition.
I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
It was not the normal Apple Mac Pricing to begin with. But let see if they will stick to $599 next year when it comes with 12GB RAM and hopefully double the SSD speed. I wouldn't be surprised it would have similar sales if it was priced $699.
It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
> It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
Apple's advantage is that they design a large share of their own parts, and their partners build them at a very high volume since they are used in more than one product line.
They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.
At a lower Neo volumes, they were using alreasdy manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.
They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.
Lower margin, but higher volume. Plus a subset of the buyers will subscribe to Apple Music, buy apps from the App Store, etc.
I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.
I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.
Leaving money on the table, as opposed to losing it. They make a decent buck on the hardware, but could have charged more (though likely would have sold fewer units).
The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters).
The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
It really just works.
They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement.
These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.
I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.
My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year
I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.
The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
Choosing an OS 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...
It used to be,
> Do you fear technology?
> > Yes
> Is your daddy rich?
> > Yes
> MacOS
I guess we can remove the second question now.
"Do you fear technology?" should be "Do you have no fucks to give for all the bullshit?"
I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.
They probably know that but don’t want to cannibalize their more expensive products.
A lot of the buyers were never going to be buyers for the more expensive products.
You can afford to lose a lot of low-value low-margin buyers for not losing one high-value high-margin buyer.
that doesn't, on its own, alleviate the cannibalization concerns
If they don't make this product at this pricepoint, a competitor does and that also cannibalizes potential higher sku macbook sales to a degree. Every chromebook sold is a potential macbook neo customer and apple let google eat their lunch for years.
Just so you know, the original Ford Maverick started out at just under $2,000 in 1970.
Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing. Nobody knows how to make things properly. Here in the UK you won't even find competent sheet metal fabricator (except for military or when you have more money than sense, but then whatever you want to sell will be dead in the water because of unaffordability).
I would happily buy a laptop with medium specs but apple build quality. I don't know if the Neo's build quality is on par with their other laptops but if it is it's probably my next laptop.
I would rather own a used MacBook AIR than a new MacBook Neo. I usually don't like used computers but I just can't stand the anxiety of having to only have 8Gb RAM. Sure, it swaps, it compresses memory etc.. but still.
It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
Would be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.
... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.
It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
[1] https://www.iculture.nl/nieuws/iphone-3g-als-los-toestel-87-...
My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)
Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.
I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)
>a decade ago
It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.
The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.
> I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright
but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?
I would like to know how these are on XCode - would love to have the cheapest/most lightweight possible way to build iOS apps (derived from some cross-platform builder like Expo/Lynx/Dioxus) since I have no other use for MacOS.
Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.
you'll hit the RAM limit at some point, and you'd almost certainly want to mod it to alleviate the heat issues that kill sustained performance
I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses.
It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
[delayed]
Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.
The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.
Agree. I could afford "better" but the Neo suits my needs perfectly and I don't like expensive laptops that are prone to damage and theft. Dollar for dollar it is the best computer I've ever bought.
It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC
I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.
You must be joking. I had Eee PC, and it was terrible.
Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.
It's no accident that they are bad computers. They aren't "fit for purpose" unless they are too weak to play Krunker.
Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose.
"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.
With 12GB it's a seriously cool offering. I actually know 8GB works as well, and I've seen people on MacBook Airs with 50 tabs open, full IDE's and breezing. But I still would want at least 4GB more to be on the safe side.
Web applications and websites are more bloated than ever. I think you need more ram not less.
Not surprising. I've been looking at potentially getting one for my mother. Her last Windows 10 laptop is pretty long in the tooth, and there's no way in hell I'm getting her one with Windows 11 on it.
The Neo seems to fill the same niche that the Chromebook once did, and, since she's already in the Apple ecosystem due to her iPhone, an "Apple Chromebook" seems like an attractive proposition.
I wonder what effect the colours have on sales?
It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than silver or dark grey.
I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
They make the best-selling phone model in the world. Best-selling smart watch, etc. Apple is not a luxury brand.
> I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires
It was not the normal Apple Mac Pricing to begin with. But let see if they will stick to $599 next year when it comes with 12GB RAM and hopefully double the SSD speed. I wouldn't be surprised it would have similar sales if it was priced $699.
It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
> It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.
I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro.
I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
> The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.
Apple's advantage is that they design a large share of their own parts, and their partners build them at a very high volume since they are used in more than one product line.
They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.
At a lower Neo volumes, they were using alreasdy manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.
They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.
Lower margin, but higher volume. Plus a subset of the buyers will subscribe to Apple Music, buy apps from the App Store, etc.
I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.
I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.
If they had really thought the iPad could replace laptops they would have tried harder the way Microsoft did with Win 8.
I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?
Leaving money on the table, as opposed to losing it. They make a decent buck on the hardware, but could have charged more (though likely would have sold fewer units).
no chance
actually i am thankful that microslop is losing more than apple. They could've made better OS than macos by not adding candy crush or copilot slop.