The new MacBook Neo It costs 699 euros because it has the iPhone 16 Pro chip inside. Not the M4 from a couple of years ago, neither the M3 nor the M2. The A18 Pro: the same processor as many people have in their pocket.
Apple has solved the price problem by doing something that until recently would have been unthinkable in its own mental architecture: reuse a mobile chip in a laptop. They put it in an aluminum case with a keyboard and hinge, gave it a new name, and sold it as if it were a different category.
It is not. It is something more similar to an iPhone without a touch screen, with a trackpad and keyboard, and with macOS on top.
For years, Apple has maintained (implicitly but consistently) that the Mac and iPhone were worlds apart, with different chips, for different uses. ARM architecture unified the foundation six years ago, but the M family and the A family followed separate paths: one for the desktop, the laptop and the tablet; another for mobile.
That separation has sustained an entire product hierarchy. The Neo just killed it. Apple is admitting that the mobile chip is sufficient for most customers’ laptops. It is a recognition that has more implications than the price. If the iPhone chip is good enough for a Mac, what exactly the hell were we paying for before?
The answer is… Apple’s margin. And the name. And the feeling that a Mac was something qualitatively different from a mobile phone with a keyboard. Now that feeling has a reference price: 600 euros difference between the cheapest MacBook and the most expensive iPhone. And the Neo’s USB-C ports don’t support Thunderbolt because the A18 Pro It doesn’t support it, so that’s not a product decision, it’s an original limitation that Apple has accepted as sufficient.
The Neo isn’t exactly a strategic bet either. It’s more like an admission.. Apple had spent years without anything really competitive below 1,000 euros and it knew it, which is why sold the M1 in the United States for $700 as an emergency maneuver. On this side of the Atlantic, the empire of reconditioned and second-hand goods was taking away too many sales.
The iPad with keyboard did almost the same thing as the entry-level MacBook Air and cost less, with the disadvantage of iPadOS but with greater versatility due to the touch screen and the option of using it undocked. The only way down was to cross the internal borders that Apple itself had built between its chip families.
And there is what the Neo leaves in the air, more interesting than any specification: if the mobile chip is already sufficient for the work laptop of the majority, the convergence between both categories is not a future hypothesis. This is what Apple just put in its window for 699 mutts.
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Featured image | Apple
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