MacBook Neo - The One?

It’s Saturday, it’s late, I’m recovering from one hell of a head cold, and this blog post is based on nothing more than a few short notes in Google Keep. I guess tonight I’m blogging like it’s 2009! Except that, for the first time in a long time, I’m actually jumping on a bandwagon. You see, earlier this week, whilst I was going viral the hard way, Apple finally announced the newest scion of their MacBook family, the MacBook Neo. Now, I’m not in the market for a new MacBook, my current MacBook Air is my pride and joy and I’ll use that for as long as I can. I also don’t like the lack of TouchID on the base model, or the colour incongruity between the keyboard and the casing, especially given the otherwise striking Citrus colorway that’s available for the device. 

You won't believe how long I've been crying out for fun colours to return to computers!

However, I’m going to be honest here. For someone who does a lot of writing, dabbles in the occasional bit of Photoshop for article header images, and has moved much of his gaming to GeForce Now, a device like the MacBook Neo might actually be more appropriate than the MacBook Air I’m currently using. The device is still only available for pre-order at the time of writing, with devices shipping from March 11th 2026, but nothing I’ve seen indicates that these machines are going to be underpowered for this kind of “everyday” workload, and all at a very competitive price point.

At 699€ for the base model (including VAT here in the civilised world), I consider this to be a steal for a MacBook, certainly if you're doing standard office workloads.

Not that you’d know that if you read the comments of many Apple fans, who universally claim that the MacBook Neo is effectively obsolete at launch because it can’t run two 5k monitors at the same time, edit 8k or whatever video, simulate high-speed particle collisions, analyse CERN data for traces of gravitons or whatever. I mean, 8GB of RAM? That’s archaic!!! 256GB of storage? My calculator has more! Seriously, the spec hounds and silicon addicts have completely lost the plot and seem to be incapable of understanding that this machine wasn’t built for them, but for “normal” people. 

To be fair, this type of spec blindness is not new. It’s something I wrote about way back in 2021, after I’d gotten a device I’d been wanting to get my hands on for a long time, Microsoft’s Surface Go 2. That too was a low-spec device aimed at pedestrian workloads, and whilst Windows 11 would turn out to slow that device down to a crawl, for a while, it was a good machine, even in its base configuration. Yet almost no one in the tech space seemed to even want to touch it because of its low spec. It seems to me that many tech heads out there take great exception to the very concept of a low-spec device, or even the mere baseline version of a more powerful device. Hell, I’ve seen more than one commenter seriously state that my configuration of MacBook Air, an M4 model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, an absolute powerhouse of a machine, is unusable junk! To put it bluntly, those people need a reality check. Preferably with either a blunt object or a large mackerel!

Not everyone needs a machine as powerful as the M4 MacBook Air, although I truly love mine!

Coming back to the MacBook Neo, I’m genuinely excited to see this new addition to Apple’s product line. Not only is it an affordable model, at least by Apple standards, but it’s a return of fun to the laptop space. The Citrus colour way in particular recalls the netbooks of the late 2000s and early 2010s and carries with it a certain sense of irreverence that is desperately needed in the tech space. Granted, the introduction of dual-screen and folding-screen laptops over recent years has injected some dynamism into a previously stagnant field, similar to the introduction of foldables and full-screen flip phones in the smartphone market, but those devices are either expensive or kept out of the market by overly-cautious cellular carriers. 

That’s why the MacBook Neo is so important. Not only is it the logical culmination of the netbook concept I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but the Apple of 2026 has both the brand recognition and economic power to actually make the concept work this time around. It’s not a device for the spec hounds, nor for the videographers or hardcore gamers, true. But it’s a MacBook for everyone else, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s its strongest point!