Apple’s budget MacBook Neo and M5 MacBook Pro hit stores

Apple just unleashed an avalanche of six new hardware drops, and the biggest shock isn't the flagship silicon—it's how low the entry barrier just got.

Leading the charge is the brand-new MacBook Neo. Starting at $599, it is officially Apple's most affordable laptop ever. The machine packs a fanless aluminum chassis, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, up to 16 hours of battery life, and four pastel-style colors. Under the hood, Apple's testing specs reveal it runs on an A18 Pro chip paired with 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD.

Right alongside it sits the iPhone 17e, also landing at $599. Instead of cutting corners on capacity, Apple doubled the baseline storage to 256GB at the same price point. It gets the newest A19 processor, a 48MP Fusion camera, MagSafe support, and Ceramic Shield 2 with three times the scratch resistance.

The pro lineup gets serious muscle

While the budget end is stealing the spotlight, Apple quietly supercharged the rest of the ecosystem. The MacBook Air now runs on the M5 chip and doubles its base storage to 512GB.

The MacBook Pro line gets the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Each GPU core now features a dedicated Neural Accelerator, driving up to 4x the AI performance of the previous generation and 8x over M1 systems. Storage starts at 1TB for the Pro and 2TB for the Max. Both new MacBook families also pack Apple's custom N1 chip, unlocking Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Rounding out the release, the iPad Air jumps to M4 without raising its price, while the new Studio Display XDR introduces a 27-inch 5K mini-LED panel hitting 2,000 nits peak brightness, 120Hz refresh rate, and Thunderbolt 5 support.

Why it matters

We think Apple's real power move here isn't pushing higher peak benchmarks—it is taking direct aim at the mid-range PC market.

For students, writers, and casual creators, a $599 aluminum Mac with all-day battery changes the calculus entirely. You no longer have to settle for years-old refurbished models or plastic Chromebooks to enter the ecosystem. If your workflow revolves around browser tabs, documents, and lightweight media, MacBook Neo is worth checking out immediately.

By leveraging the A18 Pro in a laptop enclosure, Apple pulled off a classic supply-chain masterstroke. It lowers manufacturing costs while delivering silent, highly efficient computing. The obvious compromise is 8GB of base memory, which won't cut it for developers or heavy local AI pipelines. But as an on-ramp for bringing the next hundred million users into iCloud and Services, this lineup looks deadly effective.