Apple’s €699 macbook neo rips up the pricing script and dares windows to respond
Seven hundred euros for an aluminium MacBook sounded like a typo until apple hit publish last Monday. The Neo lands at €699 on Amazon—€599 if you flash a student ID—undercutting the cheapest MacBook Air by 40 % and, for the first time, planting macOS inside the mid-range Windows playground.
The guts that fit the bill
Inside sits the A18 Pro, the same 3 nm die that powers the iPhone 16 Pro. apple bins the chip, clocks it down a hair, and pairs it with 8 GB of unified memory. Translation: Safari, Office, Spotify and 25 Chrome tabs glide without a hiccup; 4 K timelines in CapCut choke after three minutes of colour grading. The machine knows its lane and stays there.
The 13-inch Liquid Retina panel keeps the 500-nit brightness and P3 colour space of its bigger siblings; the aluminium shell simply shrinks the curves and thickens the waist by 1.3 mm to hide the 36.5 Wh battery. Result: ten hours of real-world code-slinging, 16 if you stick to local video. The fanless cavity stays silent even when the logic board hits 70 °C—apple’s thermal paste wizardry finally paying off in a budget chassis.
Ports, pennies and the missing finger
Two USB-C ports live on opposite edges: the left one races at 10 Gb/s, the right crawls at USB 2.0 speeds—a deliberate cost scalpel. A 3.5 mm jack survives, but Touch ID is optional; the base model ships with a plain power button that feels oddly retro in 2025. 256 GB of storage is soldered in, non-negotiable, and the webcam remains 1080p—not Centre Stage, not TrueTone, just honest pixels.
Colours scream youth marketing: cloud pink, butter yellow, sky blue and silver. The pink unit I carried around Madrid drew more glances than a €3 000 MacBook Pro ever did. applefinally admits that price, not prestige, moves units in lecture halls.
Who should bite
Students get a typing slab that weighs 1.23 kg and lasts two library sessions. Small-business owners get FileVault encryption and zero-touch deployment without coughing up enterprise premiums. What you don’t get is a machine for AAA gaming, Blender renders or Xcode builds the size of Final Cut. The Neo will compile Swift, but you’ll sip coffee while waiting.
The sub-€700 segment just got scrambled. Acer and Lenovo now have to sell screens, keyboards and batteries against macOS updates that arrive like clockwork for six years. apple, meanwhile, harvests first-time buyers today and upsells them a MacBook Pro tomorrow. The playbook is ruthless, and the price is the sharpest page.