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Apple is looking to gain a foothold in the more budget-friendly end of the laptop market with the MacBook Neo. The system starts at $599, which is darn inexpensive for an Apple laptop — it even has the same starting price as the M4 iPad Air.
As such, the MacBook Neo should help Apple compete with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks. Pricing it at $499 for educational use won't exactly hurt either.
Apple is really lowering the cost of entry for those looking to pick up a new MacBook here. The base MacBook Neo costs $500 less than the cheapest M5 MacBook Air, which is now officially Apple's midrange laptop.
Of course, there are a lot of tradeoffs you'll make by opting for a MacBook Neo instead of a MacBook Air. If you're curious about all the differences between the Neo and the base 13.6-inch Air (and perhaps what you'll be foregoing if go you with the cheaper option), we've got you covered.
MacBook Neo vs. MacBook Air exteriors
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 Apple today provided public beta testers with the third release of an upcoming macOS Tahoe 26.4 update for testing purposes. The public beta comes a week after Apple seeded the second beta.
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 The MacBook Neo is now Apple's entry-level MacBook, undercutting the MacBook Air by $500. To deliver such a dramatically lower price, the MacBook Neo has a significant number of tradeoffs. Here's everything that's different between the two devices.
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Apple just announced the MacBook Neo, a 13-inch laptop offering the full macOS experience for just $599. It is the machine, I'm sure, plenty of the company's fans have been clamoring for since the dawn of the netbook. I'm equally sure its specs have enough drawbacks to ensure there are still plenty of customers for the more expensive Macbooks; the same cannot be said of the iPad Air.
If you're looking for a machine that you can actually use meaningfully, the Neo has the Air beat. It has two USB-C ports, 16-hour battery life, a real keyboard, trackpad and the ability to run macOS with proper multitasking. $599 won't even get you an iPad Air with a keyboard and trackpad, which costs you an extra $270.
Of course, the MacBook Neo is sandbagged in all of the ways Apple will always sandbag a cheaper product. But I do think the company has been smart enough to ensure the base model, which I'm sure will sell a crazy amount, is enough of a computer to matter. The A18 Pro chip will run a lot slower than Apple's M-Series silicon but raw performance isn't the big issue. After all, if you're buying this machine as Apple's version of a Chromebook, you're not going to be compressing 55GB Final Cut Pro files here. This is a machine for light work, the sort of stuff the iPad was always meant to enable, but has never quite been able to.
Apple knows how its A-series chip stack up against low-end laptop CPUs. Given the differences in OS, it's impossible to make a real comparis
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 Apple this week unveiled seven products, including an iPhone 17e, an iPad Air with the M4 chip, updated MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, a new Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, and an all-new MacBook Neo that starts at just $599.
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LG will produce two versions of the TV: the C6, and the bright, larger-sized C6H.
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Apple had promised a "big week" for the company as rumors swirled that it had a number of product announcements lined up. True enough, it unveiled a half-dozen new and refreshed devices over the last few days, along with more powerful chips for MacBook Pros.
The news started on Monday with the announcements of the iPhone 17e and M4-powered iPad Air. The company followed up on Tuesday with the reveal of the M5 MacBook Air, the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, MacBook Pro models that use said chips, a refreshed Studio Display
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We're telling you where to watch it all, plus F1 extras on Apple Music, Apple Sports and other Apple apps.
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EVENTS Genealogy's Star: RootsTech is here: what to know. "It is a hybrid event. The online experience is free and includes over 200 new sessions in 26 languages. The in-person event offers […]
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One of the best things about Starlink is how normal it feels. Once you get it set up, it behaves just like regular internet: it's fast, effective, and perfectly suitable for gaming and other latency-sensitive tasks.
No, Starlink isn't right for everyone. But it is good for what it is! In fact, here are some of the ways I find it even better than conventional home broadband internet (including ADSL, cable, and fiber).
Starlink is available just about everywhere
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There's really only one problem: my laptop is too old for a Windows 11 update. On October 14th, 2025, Windows 10 will reach the end of its life period, which means no new features or security updates. The former is not a big problem. The latter will be a disaster.
I'm not alone in this situation. Over 50 percent of users are still running Windows 10, and this figure is gradually dropping. How many will have updated in six months' time is anyone's guess, but whatever the percentage, one thing is clear. A large proportion of the world's 1.6 billion Windows PCs will still be running Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025.
What makes this challenging is that Windows 11 is so technically demanding that it's not possible to update all fully functional computers. Sadly, my six-year-old laptop is one of them.
If Microsoft stops updating Windows 10, it wo
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Sometimes you can notice the signs of a failing SSD. For instance, the once-quick transfer speed slows to crawl, there are frequent program or system crashes, or file system access errors or SMART errors occur. If you notice these things, especially in combination, there's a good chance your SSD is on its way out. In that case, it's time to prepare for the worst and do the following:
Back up critical files
It goes without saying that the first thing you'll want to do if you think your SSD is on the blink is to back up your critical data. Backups should be done regularly anyway, but even if you're doing that, you'll still want to make a new backup of your critical files at this point to have them ready to go should your SSD suddenly die.
See our roundups of the best Windows backup software and
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