Peter Griffin: MacBook Neo spells trouble for PCs

Apple’s lightweight MacBook Air, previously its entry-level laptop, will cost you at least $2199. It’s great, but out of reach of the sort of people who would make the most of it – students, young professionals and busy home multitaskers. The Neo is aimed squarely at disillusioned Windows users who are fed up with uninspired laptop design, and an operating system trying to force Microsoft’s AI Copilot on them.

For years, the trade-off was simple: Windows if you want cheap, Mac if you want nice. By combining classic MacBook build quality with decent performance at a reasonable price, the Neo could shake up the entire PC market. How did Apple do it? The company already makes millions of MacBooks every year, so a slight design tweak was always doable.

The secret to hitting that price is under the hood. Apple has dropped a repurposed A18 Pro chip – the same silicon that powers the iPhone 16 Pro – into a 13‑inch MacBook shell. On paper, that sounds like a downgrade from the M‑series chips that power the other MacBooks. But the benchmarks and reviews tell a different story.

In single‑core performance, the Neo outpaces the original M1 MacBook Air and even edges past the base M2 and M3 Air, trailing the newest M4 and M5 machines only at the top of the line.

Multicore performance and memory headroom are more modest, and there are trade‑offs such as limited external display support and the lack of a backlit keyboard and force touch trackpad. But for everyday workloads – browsers, Office, streaming, email, light creative work – it is more than fast enough.

I was sceptical that the Neo would have enough grunt, so when I got hold of one, I opened several apps at once – Mail, Pages, YouTube, social media, my usual 20-30 open browser tabs, and my demanding Riverside podcast software. The Neo didn’t grind to a halt, like my ageing iMac sometimes does. I wouldn’t buy it specifically for editing video or gaming, but it can handle most of what the average user wants to do.

Apple is not being coy about who this machine is for. The Neo is intended as a gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem, mirroring what the iPhone SE did for smartphones and the cheaper iPad did for tablets. The target is price‑sensitive users who have stuck with Windows out of habit, or avoided laptops entirely because good ones cost too much and cheap ones were too painful. I ditched Windows 15 years ago and haven’t looked back.

The PC industry has long lived off a comfortable segmentation: Apple at the premium end, Windows laptop makers like Asus, Acer, HP and Dell flooding the budget and mid‑range. For Apple, which turned 50 this month, Neo offers an opportunity to squeeze more dollars from its plateauing hardware business.

Apple dropped the ball on artificial intelligence, but slick design, performance and, in Neo’s case, price matter more. And anyway, the company may have been right: Microsoft has begun scaling back its Copilot AI assistant after a backlash from PC users. If you want to use AI, you can do it via a host of apps like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.

Steve Jobs famously saved Apple from bankruptcy when he returned to the company in the late 1990s and launched the iMac range. Nearly 30 years on, Neo feels like a similarly disruptive move to give Windows users a compelling alternative.