Apple on Wednesday unveiled the MacBook Neo, a lower-cost addition to its notebook lineup that starts at $599, as it looks to expand its reach in a price-sensitive PC market while competitors face a narrowing supply of memory chips.
A cheaper laptop is one of Apple’s most aggressive entries into the PC market in years. The new MacBook will be powered by the A18 Pro chip, the same processor that debuted in the company’s iPhone 16 Pro models in 2024.
At $599, it’s far cheaper in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms than Apple’s previous non-Pro, non-Air MacBook, which debuted in May 2006 for $1,099 — about $1,750 in today’s dollars.
The new MacBook is not Apple’s first foray into the price range. The company made a special $699 MacBook Air specifically for Walmart using its M1 chip, which originally debuted in 2020, after retiring other models with that chip.
The new MacBook is aimed directly at users of Google-powered Chromebooks and lower-end Windows devices, where Microsoft’s own efforts to switch to more battery-friendly chips made with technology from Arm have failed to ignite a sales boom.
Its foray into the mid-range PC segment could help Apple expand its reach among students and first-time buyers.
In the midst of a global memory chip crunch, the new MacBook also comes with just 8 gigabytes of total memory, half the 16 gigabytes of the M4-based MacBook and less than the 12 gigabytes of the iPhone 17 Pro.
Global PC and smartphone markets remain highly price sensitive after several quarters of uneven demand, and hardware manufacturers continue to navigate fluctuating component costs, particularly for memory chips.
Apple this week launched its $599 iPhone 17e with higher base storage and updated its MacBook Air and Pro lineup with new M5 chips and standard configurations with more memory as it looks to defend market share in competitive smartphone and softening PC markets weighed down by rising memory costs.
