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Apple MacBook Neo
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A high-quality, well-built MacBook at a bargain price – but we don’t recommend it
PRICE
256GB, £499 (£599 inc VAT)
from
apple.com
In the minutes before Apple announced the MacBook Neo, I was sitting with two former colleagues in a MWC press room (see p34) playing a guessing game of “how much will this heavily rumoured budget Apple laptop cost?” We know how to have fun. I came closest at £699, a figure they both pooh-poohed – this would be at least £800, they assured me. The point not being to boast that I was closest, but that three technology journalists with 70 years of experience between us were blindsided by the MacBook Neo.
For it can’t be overstated how cheap this laptop is. Especially in a market so affected by rising prices for RAM and SSDs, which is also pushing up prices of CPUs and GPUs (both of which need memory too, of course).
Over the course of this review, I’ll explain how Apple has made the savings – and why it’s almost impossible to criticise its choices. But, perhaps controversially, I’m not going to recommend the MacBook Neo to PC Pro readers.
Corners cut
The first corners Apple has cut are physical: it has softly rounded the edges, which give this laptop a friendly, laptop-next-door vibe. It’s helped by a selection of colours that echo the first colourful iMacs, with my unit finished in attractive Indigo (think metallic blue with a faint purple hue). Colours are a matter of taste, but full marks to Apple for moving away from sombre silver – although that’s still an option, along with the far more striking Blush (pink) and Citrus (yellow-gold).
Despite the price, Apple sticks with an all-metal chassis here. While you can never be certain about a design until a few years into its life, I’m confident that Apple hasn’t sacrificed build quality to hit the low price. The first thing my daughter said when I handed her the MacBook Neo was “sturdy”.
It’s also incredibly compact. If you have two copies of PC Pro to hand, place one atop the other. The MacBook Neo is almost exactly the same width, depth and height as this, albeit twice the weight: the Neo weighs a fraction over 1.2kg.