Read in: English | Italiano
Apple just released the MacBook Neo, and the internet collectively lost its mind. Not because it’s bad. Not because it’s good. Because it’s confusing. A $599 MacBook with an A18 Pro chip (the one from the iPhone 16 Pro), 8GB of RAM, and a list of missing features that reads like Apple’s engineering team was playing “how much can we cut before someone notices.”
Spoiler: people noticed.
The Chip That Runs Your Phone Now Runs a Laptop
The A18 Pro is a mobile chip. There’s no dancing around that. Two performance cores, four efficiency cores, and a 5-core GPU. For context, the M5 MacBook Air has four performance cores and six efficiency cores. So the Neo is running on roughly half the compute horsepower of its $1,099 sibling.
But here’s the thing people keep forgetting: the A-series chips are really good. The A18 Pro benchmarks faster than most Intel laptops from two years ago. For web browsing, documents, streaming, and light photo editing, it’s more than enough. The people who need eight performance cores aren’t shopping at $599.
8GB: The War That Never Ends
Nothing ignites a tech argument faster than RAM. The MacBook Neo ships with 8GB of unified memory, and no, you can’t upgrade it.
The reaction has been predictable. One camp says 8GB is embarrassingly low in 2026. The other camp says macOS is so efficient with memory management that 8GB on a Mac works differently than 8GB on a Windows machine. Both camps are partially right, which is why this argument will never end.
Here’s the nuance most people miss: macOS doesn’t use RAM the way Windows does. Apple’s memory management uses aggressive compression and fast NVMe swap. The metric that matters isn’t “memory used” (which will always show nearly full, because macOS treats empty RAM as wasted RAM). It’s memory pressure. If your memory pressure graph is green, your machine is fine. Period.
That said, “fine” isn’t “ideal.” Open 30 Chrome tabs, a Slack window, Spotify, and VS Code simultaneously, and you’ll start hitting swap. The machine won’t crash. It’ll just pause for a beat while it juggles. For casual users who live in Safari with a handful of tabs? 8GB is plenty. For developers or power users? This laptop literally isn’t for you, and Apple isn’t pretending otherwise.
Everything They Cut (And Why You Should Care)
The list of things missing from the MacBook Neo is impressively long:
- No keyboard backlighting. You’re reading that correctly. A 2026 laptop without lit keys.
- No Force Touch trackpad. It physically clicks, like it’s 2012.
- No MagSafe. You charge via USB-C. If someone trips on your cable, your laptop goes flying.
- No True Tone display. The screen doesn’t adjust its white balance to ambient light.
- No Thunderbolt. The fastest port is USB 3.0. That’s 5 Gbps, not the 40 Gbps you get with Thunderbolt 4.
- No fast charging. It comes with a 20W charger. For context, some phones charge faster.
- No camera notch. Which is actually a win. The camera sits in a thicker bezel instead.
- Wi-Fi 6E, not Wi-Fi 7. Fine for now, but it’ll age faster.
Every one of these cuts exists to hit that $599 price point. And honestly? For the target audience, most of these don’t matter. The kid doing homework on Google Docs at 2 PM doesn’t need keyboard backlighting. The parent checking email doesn’t care about Thunderbolt bandwidth.
The Port Situation Is Comedy
The MacBook Neo has three ports: two USB-C and a headphone jack. Sounds reasonable until you look closer.
One USB-C port is USB 3.0 (5 Gbps). The other is USB 2.0 (480 Mbps). That second port is basically an iPhone charging cable in disguise. And here’s the best part: there is no visual distinction between them on the machine itself. You just have to remember which side is the fast one.
Apple, a company that built its reputation on “it just works,” shipped a laptop where plugging your external drive into the wrong side makes your transfer 10x slower. The headphone jack doesn’t support high-impedance headphones either, so your audiophile gear is staying home.
Who This Is Actually For
Here’s where the conversation gets interesting. The loudest critics are developers, power users, and tech enthusiasts. In other words, people who were never going to buy a $599 laptop.
The MacBook Neo is for:
- Students who need a real computer for school
- Parents who want something reliable that lasts
- First-time Mac buyers coming from a Chromebook or a $400 Windows machine
- iPhone owners who want their laptop and phone to actually talk to each other
That last point is underrated. If you have an iPhone, the MacBook Neo gives you Handoff, AirDrop, Universal Clipboard, Instant Hotspot, and iPhone Mirroring out of the box. Try getting that level of integration on a Lenovo IdeaPad.
The Chromebook Killer?
This is where it gets spicy. The MacBook Neo starts at $599, and the education model is $499. That puts it squarely in Chromebook territory, except it runs a real operating system with real desktop applications.
Chromebooks have owned the education market for years because they’re cheap, managed easily, and hard to break. The MacBook Neo counters with better build quality (aluminum vs. plastic), a vastly superior operating system, and 16 hours of battery life. But it lacks a touchscreen, has no pen input, and Apple’s device management isn’t as dead-simple as Google’s admin console for schools.
The bet Apple is making: parents buying the computer (as opposed to school IT departments issuing them) will choose the Mac. Because it’s aluminum, because it runs “real” software, because it has Apple Intelligence built in, and because it matches the iPhone their kid already has.
That’s probably a smart bet.
The Elephant in the Room: Software Bloat
One thread running through the discussion is the state of modern software. The reason 8GB feels tight in 2026 isn’t because operating systems got more demanding. It’s because developers stopped caring about efficiency.
Slack is an Electron app that regularly eats 1GB+ of RAM to send messages. VS Code is another Electron app. Chrome treats every tab as its own process. A “simple” web page with analytics scripts, chat widgets, and ad trackers can consume hundreds of megabytes.
The MacBook Neo’s 8GB limitation is less an Apple problem and more an indictment of the entire software industry. We got faster hardware and responded by writing slower software. The Neo just makes that reality uncomfortably visible.
The Bottom Line
The MacBook Neo isn’t revolutionary. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s Apple’s answer to a simple question: what’s the cheapest Mac we can make that still feels like a Mac?
At $599 (or $499 for students), with an aluminum build, 16-hour battery, a Retina display, and full macOS with Apple Intelligence, the answer is “pretty cheap, actually.”
If you’re reading this on a $2,000 MacBook Pro, the Neo isn’t for you. But your younger sibling, your parents, or your friend who’s been limping along on a seven-year-old Windows laptop? They’re going to love it. And they’re never going to think about keyboard backlighting. Not once.