As the finale of Apple’s three new products this week, the much-anticipated MacBook Neo is finally here. I don’t know how many people still remember: In 2008, Apple’s founder Steve Jobs gave a speech at this press conference. When the MacBook Air was unveiled, he unhurriedly picked up a cowhide envelope-style document bag from the signature desk next to it. There seemed to be a stack of documents in the document bag. He easily and slowly lifted up the document bag, unsealed it as usual, and pulled out the silver notebook from inside.

"This is the new MacBook Air. You can feel how thin it is. Yes, it's that thin." This is how Jobs created a famous scene in the history of technology.

Nearly twenty years have passed, and although Gang Leader Qiao has left us, this famous scene is still a "famous scene" in the hearts of many people today.

Now, the spiritual successor of the original MacBook Air is finally here - but this time, it does not pursue thinness and lightness, but appears in the form of the cheapest MacBook in Apple's history.

01

The final blow of Apple’s “new product barrage” this week

In the past three days, Apple has intensively released a whole wave of product line updates in a rare way of "not holding a press conference but continuously releasing new products." From Monday to today, the pace is so fast that it makes people a little breathless.

First up on Monday were the iPhone 17e and the new iPad Air. Tuesday is a major update of productivity tools - the M5 Pro/M5 Max version of MacBook Pro is here, and the M5 version of MacBook Air is also updated simultaneously. Two monitors were also announced: the Studio Display adds Thunderbolt 5, and the new Studio Display XDR, which replaces the old Pro Display XDR with mini-LED and 120Hz.

Seven new products. Three days. There was no live broadcast of the press conference, and there was no "One more thing" - but the one that appeared at the end was the most surprising one.


02

How does a Mac cost 4,599 yuan?

MacBook Neo. The name exudes freshness - "Neo", meaning new life and starting point.

It's an outlier in Apple's Mac product line.This is the first Mac to use an iPhone chip.

A18 Pro, the chip that debuted in last year’s iPhone 16 Pro, is now packed into a laptop. 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU (1 less GPU core than the mobile version), 16-core Neural Engine. It’s not an M-series chip, it’s a genuine mobile processor.

what does that mean? It's not here to steal the MacBook Air's job - for daily web browsing, document processing, video streaming, even light photo editing and running some Apple Intelligence's local AI tasks, the A18 Pro is completely adequate. But if you want to use it to cut 4K videos or run large models, then look at the M5 Air and Pro next door.

The comparison object given by Apple is quite interesting: not its own MacBook Air, but the "best-selling PC notebook" equipped with Intel Core Ultra 5. Official data says daily tasks are 50% faster and local AI loads are 3x faster. This frame of reference was chosen very accurately——The real rival of MacBook Neo is not its own brother, but the mainstream notebooks in the Windows camp priced at 3,000-5,000 yuan.

At the hardware level, it makes some trade-offs.

13-inch Liquid Retina screen, 2408×1506 resolution, 500 nits brightness, and support for 1 billion colors - the quality of this screen is quite impressive at this price. There are no bangs, replaced by iPad-style equal-width narrow borders, which is visually much refreshing.

There are four colors - silver, indigo, peach pink (Blush), and citrus yellow (Citrus). The keyboard also has corresponding light colors, and it also comes with wallpapers of the same color. Weighing 1.22 kg, it’s really light to carry.


But the savings are honest: the keyboard isn't backlit, the trackpad is mechanical rather than Force Touch, the $599 base model only has 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, and — no Touch ID. Want fingerprint scanner and 512GB of storage? Add $100, $699 (National Bank 5,299 yuan).

Two USB-C ports, one headphone jack, and no MagSafe. 1080p front-facing camera, dual side speakers supporting spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. 16 hours of battery life.

Are these compromises reasonable? I think, for the group of people it's aimed at - it's quite reasonable.

03

What game is Apple playing?

In terms of price, the MacBook Neo starts at 4,599 yuan in China - this number itself is impactful enough. After all, we are talking about a Mac, not a true "netbook".

But more importantly, the price range of MacBook Neo falls within the coverage of the national subsidy policy.

This year’s national subsidies for digital products are quite strong, and the subsidy range for notebook computers can usually reach 15%-20% of the selling price. After the starting price of 4,599 yuan plus national subsidies,The actual price can easily reach over 3,000 yuan.Buying a brand new Mac laptop for more than three thousand yuan - if you said this a year ago, it would probably be regarded as a joke.


The Touch ID + 512GB version priced at 5,299 yuan falls in the early 4,000 range after subsidies, and the price/performance ratio is even more exaggerated. Coupled with Apple's own education discount - students can purchase the basic model for only $499 (corresponding to the National Bank's education price will be even lower). When the two discounts are combined, the lethality of this machine in the student market may far exceed that of any previous Apple product.

To put it simply: Apple has released a notebook at a price that is within the comfort zone of Redmi and Honor.

This is almost unprecedented in Apple's product line. The last time Apple played such an aggressive price tag in the notebook market probably dates back to... well, actually there was no last time. The MacBook Neo is Apple's cheapest laptop ever.

The target users it wants are very clear. A large number of students, entry-level users, potential switch people who are waiting from the Windows or Chromebook camp-this is a huge market, and Apple has previously kept these people away because of the price threshold. Now the state subsidy has helped Apple kick down the last hurdle. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple Stores are preparing for traffic levels "comparable to the new iPhone launches in the fall." In the Chinese market, this preparation may have to be doubled.

There is a deeper logic here. Putting iPhone chips into Macs is ostensibly a means of reducing costs - the production cost of A18 Pro is much lower than that of M series chips, which is the core reason why Neo can reach $599. But thinking about it on the other hand,This is also Apple testing the flexibility of its chip architecture: can the same chip support both mobile phones and laptops?If the Neo sells well, Apple is likely to further blur the lines between iPhones and Macs in the future.


As an aside, this reminds me of when Apple used the A12X chip to arm the iPad Pro. Many people said that "the iPad has excessive performance" - but a few years later, the iPad really began to eat away at the notebook market.

Now that A18 Pro comes to Mac, the same script may be played again, but this time in the opposite direction.

The four color combinations are also very interesting. In addition to silver, indigo, peach pink, and citrus yellow are completely targeted at young users and student groups. The last time Apple played with so many colors on a Mac was with the 2021 iMac. With this little thing, Apple has sent a very clear signal: Mac is no longer just a "professional tool", it can also be a good-looking, affordable, and everyday thing.


It’s March again. When Steve Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of the envelope, he wanted to prove that laptops could be incredibly thin.

Today, Apple wants to prove something different with the MacBook Neo: a Mac can be incredibly cheap.

As for how many people this "incredible" will eventually allow to enter the world of macOS for the first time - we will know the answer when it goes on sale on March 11.