Apple on Wednesday unveiled the MacBook Neo, a lower-priced addition to its lineup of laptops starting at $599, as it seeks to expand its reach in a price-sensitive PC market as rivals face a tighter supply of memory chips.
A lower-priced laptop marks one of Apple’s most aggressive entry points 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 much cheaper in nominal and inflation-adjusted terms than Apple’s previous non-Pro, non-Air MacBook, which debuted in May 2006 at $1,099, about $1,750 in today’s dollars.
The new MacBook is not Apple’s first foray into the price segment. The company made a special $699 MacBook Air especially for Walmart using its M1 chip, which originally debuted in 2020, after retiring other models with that chip.
The new MacBook is aimed squarely at users of Google-powered Chromebooks and low-end Windows devices, where Microsoft’s own efforts to switch to chips with longer battery life made with Arm technology have failed to spark a sales boom.
Its foray into the mid-range PC segment could help Apple expand its reach among students and first-time buyers.
Amid a global memory chip crisis, the new MacBook also comes with just 8 gigabytes of unified memory, half the 16 gigabytes of the M4-based MacBook and less than the 12 gigabytes of the iPhone 17 Pro.
The 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 increased base storage and updated its MacBook Air and Pro lineup with new M5 chips and standard configurations with increased memory, as it seeks to defend its market share in the competitive smartphone and PC markets, strained by rising memory costs.
