It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since the 2018 iPad Pro debuted. With its slim, uniform bezel around its 120Hz ProMotion display, powered by its snappy A12X Bionic chip, it felt like the iPad was perfected. And for a majority of iPad users, that was the case.
While the iPad Pro releases didn’t stop after 2018, lots of pro users were slower to upgrade, even with the introduction of the M-series chips in the 2020s iPad Pros. Most ‘pros’ didn’t need more performance; they didn’t need a better pencil, and they didn’t need a better camera system. No matter how capable the new iPad Pros may be, they’re still running the same iPadOS and the same apps. So what does all of this have to do with the MacBook Neo?
The MacBook Neo shook the PC industry, offering premium build quality and great performance for $599 USD. Its display, trackpad, speakers, I/O and light-less keyboard are not as premium as its more expensive sibling, the MacBook Air. For most people, however, it’s perfect. It’s running on Apple’s A18 Pro chip – the one found in the iPhone 16 Pro, and macOS helps it feel every bit as performant as the M-Series chips, with single-core performance outpacing the legendary M1 MacBook Air. I hear it even does a decent job handling some pro apps and workflows.
The 2018 iPad Pro - Image from Apple.com
The MacBook Neo is a game-changer for personal computing, but it’s also the 2018 iPad Pro all over again. Once your computer does everything you need it to do, why upgrade? When Apple released its M1 MacBook lineup, I, like many others, were blown away by their price to performance ratio. These laptops were much faster than the Intel-based MacBooks of the previous decade. They were the go-to recommendation for many – computers you really couldn’t go wrong with. It felt like the Mac experience was perfected, and that still remains five years later.
But with how good Apple Silicon performs, most people, myself included, found that the M1 MacBook Air was a suitable replacement for our Intel-based MacBook Pros. And the MacBook Neo really drives this point home. In a lot of ways it’s faster than the M1 MacBook Air at nearly half its MSRP. Now most users can get a capable, performant, well-constructed machine that can do pretty much anything you’d want for $599. Anything extra, like the M5 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, is mostly gravy.
I think in a way this is Apple’s biggest problem: they make computers that are just too good now. It’s not a problem for us, of course. We benefit from having great performing computers at great prices that last for years. For Apple, though, I’m not sure how they’ll lure most people to upgrade their Macs more than once a decade. With the cheapest MacBooks getting so good, convincing most people to splurge for extra features at an extra cost may prove to be even more difficult when the Neo 2 arrives.