Why the New $500 Macbook Neo is Perfect for High Schoolers

Caption: Apple’s MacBook Neo, available in Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. Photo from Apple/apple.com

Recently, Apple made a new pastel-colored addition to their shelves–the Macbook Neo. For only $500 with the student discount, Apple may have made the new value king of laptops for high schoolers.

$500 is big news. The next cheapest Apple laptop would be the base configuration Macbook Air 13” at $1100, meaning Apple’s new best value proposition just halved in price. The Neo doesn’t compromise much to achieve this price, either. With a bright 500 nit Liquid Retina display (219 pixels per inch), 256gb (or 512gb, for another $100) of storage, and an advertised 16 hours of video streaming on battery, the Neo is no slouch. Most Windows laptops at this price range are clunky and slow, have terrible low color gamut screens, lackluster battery life and tinny speakers. In fact, the school laptops we all know and love cost upwards of $1000 at MSRP. Imagine how bad a Windows laptop at half that price would be.

So how did Apple do it? The answer is the years of R&D already conducted for the parts this amalgamation of a laptop uses. The Neo uses the same chip inside an iPhone Pro 16. It uses the same speakers, too. The surprisingly competent webcam and microphones are also taken from their mobile line of devices. Unlike Windows laptop OEM manufacturers, Apple can repurpose their mature, well-developed parts for their most budget laptops. The Apple “polish” makes the Neo truly outstanding for its price.

But what about that chip? Seriously, a phone chip in a laptop? Is it slow? Well, actually, no. The A18 pro is the fastest consumer CPU in the world. With one very big asterisk—it only holds the crown in single-core performance. In the modern era of computing, many tasks are multithreaded and benefit greatly from multicore performance. But that doesn’t detract from the added snappiness and responsiveness high single core performance provides.

But there’s another, slightly smaller caveat on the processor. Due to the physical design of the A18 pro SOC (system-on-a-chip) Apple repurposed for the Neo, it’s limited to 8GB of memory, same as the iPhone it was originally made for. 8GB is rather limiting for medium intensity multitasking, development, video and photo editing, and the Adobe suite. But for most people writing emails, reading documents, consuming media, and doing browser-based work, this won’t matter at all (ergo, 99.9% of high schoolers). In fact, the current school laptops we all know and “love” also have the same 8gb of memory (even running at a much slower speed).

In coming years, the issue of memory will lessen. The A19 pro chip in this year’s iPhone 17 Pros has 12GB of memory, and by the pattern the Neo is showing, it’ll be the chip in the next Neo to release. For those of us that need a new laptop at this price range, the Macbook Neo should be at the top of a very short list. Its build quality is unheard of at $500, and if you own an iPhone, it offers an inexpensive entry into the tightly integrated Apple ecosystem.

Combined with its low price, Apple may even be poised to corner the education market. Maybe in a few years, everyone in the Bellevue School District will be typing away on a Mac instead of a Windows machine.