Apple launches colorful MacBook Neo at $599 with an iPhone chip

Say hello to the cheap MacBook of your dreams, in plenty of peppy colors.

By Nadeem Sarwar Published March 4, 2026

MacBook Neo — MacBook Neo Apple

Apple has just introduced its most affordable laptop, the MacBook Neo, priced at $599 in the US. The new laptop comes in indigo, blush, silver, and citrus color options, while rocking the same fundamental design language as the latest generation MacBook Air.

What’s inside the MacBook Neo?

It features a 13-inch display with a 2408 x 1506 pixels resolution and 500 nits of peak brightness. Notably, there is no notch at the top, and the bezels are also thicker. Apple is offering the laptop in two storage variants – 256GB and 512GB – while the RAM is locked at 8GB capacity.

Recommended Videos

The keyboard is not backlit

The chipset in question is the A18 Pro, which offers a 6‑core CPU (2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) and a 5-core graphics engine. Apple is touting 16 hours of battery life on this one, thanks to a 36.5‑watt‑hour lithium‑ion battery fitted inside the chassis.

The port situation is no different. You only get two on the left, viz. a USB 3 (USB-C) with up to 10Gb/s output and a slower USB 2 (USB-C) port that peaks at 480Mb/s. There’s also a 3.5m headphone jack on the right edge.

The caveats

The low-cost of MacBook Neo means plenty of sacrifices. It can drive only a single 4K external display, and that too at 60Hz. Additionally, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor is locked to the pricier 512GB storage version. Notably, the weight of the Neo and Air models is identical, even though the Neo is narrower and slimmer.

No ambient light sensor, either

The memory bandwidth is also much lower compared to the MacBook Air (60GB/s vs 153GB/s), while the Liquid Retina display misses out on the True Tone technology and only supports the sRGB color gamut, instead of the wider P3 color gamut.

Wireless connectivity is also limited to Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6 standards. Over at the front, you get a 1080p FaceTime camera, while audio output is handled by a pair of side-firing speakers. The MacBook Neo is now up for pre-orders in the US priced at $599, while the 512GB variant will set you back by $699 in the US market.

Managing Editor

Nadeem is the Managing Editor at Digital Trends.

Topics

Computing

Qualcomm is set to ratchet up chip prices in September, and your next gadget upgrade could bear the brunt

The price hike could touch every Snapdragon-powered device category.

The new Qualcomm Snadragon 8 Elite Gen 5

I want you to sit with this for a second. Qualcomm, the company whose Snapdragon chips sit inside your Android phone and tablet, your Windows laptop, your Meta smart glasses, your Galaxy Watch, and your wireless earbuds, reportedly sent a letter to every major customer telling them prices are going up by double digits.

The price hike will be in effect from September 1, 2026, a recent Bloomberg report claims. Essentially, all the companies placing their chip orders after that will pay a higher price.

Computing

Stop fighting with your roomie over outlets and get one of these multi-port chargers before you head back to school

One plug, zero drama, all your devices charged by morning.

Satechi ChargeView

Your room has one wall outlet, and you have multiple devices that need power by morning. Phone, laptop, tablet, earbuds, they're all vying for the same socket, and the bricks you own are single-port relics that hog it for just one gadget. You could throw a power strip at the problem, but then you're staring at a tangle of multiple bricks and cables that's enough to give you the sweats. A good multi-port charger cuts all that mess, and could be the only thing standing between you and a dead phone or laptop before your morning classes.

Back-to-school season is a smart time to buy one. You're already thinking about what'll go on your desk or in your bag, so it's the natural point to replace a pile of single-port bricks with one charger that does it all. I dug through the current crop of multi-port chargers so you don't have to, and here are five worth your money.

Computing

OpenAI’s rogue AI hack was just the beginning, Hugging Face warns

OpenAI’s rogue AI has come back to bite it

Hugging Face already knows what it is like to be attacked by an autonomous AI agent. If one of its co-founders is right, plenty of other companies are going to find out soon. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, has called the recent cyberattack carried out by OpenAI models a “wake-up call” for the technology industry.

Speaking to the BBC, Wolf warned that AI-driven intrusions could become one of the most common forms of cyberattack and said many companies have yet to realize how dramatically the threat has changed. This arrives after OpenAI disclosed that its models escaped a restricted cybersecurity evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain answers for the ExploitGym benchmark. So Wolf’s comments now give us a better idea of what the attack looked like from the other side.