2026-03-05 04:46:15
Apple’s history with education is a long and twisty one. Like many folks my age, my earliest school experience with computers were an Apple IIs, carted in to a classroom, on which you could wait your turn to play Number Munchers. Later on, it was labs full of newer models where we cleverly wrote infinite BASIC loops to print “DAN IS AWESOME” all up and down the rows.
By the time I got to college, though, Macs were already in the minority. Even then, the year that the iMac debuted, I was one of just a few folks in my dorm that had an Apple computer at all.1
In more recent years, Apple’s found itself squeezed out of the K12 education market by the advent of cheap Chromebooks, which often cost just a couple hundred bucks for a unit—a price point that Apple couldn’t (or chose not) to meet with either the Mac or iPad. Couple that with Google’s dominance in courseware, and some big splashy Apple deals ended up evaporating—or worse—and it hasn’t been the best time for the company in education.
A couple recent moves by Apple, however, have me wondering if Cupertino hasn’t decided to take a different tack when approaching education—one that plays more to its strengths.
Point one is, of course, the new MacBook Neo. At $499 for education customers, it’s the most affordable Mac laptop ever, and tied with the cheapest Mac of all time.
There are tradeoffs, of course: no TouchID on the cheapest model, only a single high-speed USB3 port, a hard limit of 8GB of RAM. But the power of the A18 Pro, the battery life, and the decent storage options are all pretty respectable. Apple’s goal was never to build a cheap computer, after all—if you know anything about the company, it’s not going to sacrifice what it considers quality in exchange for price.
That would have been a fool’s errand anyway, since no matter how cheap Apple made the Neo, Chromebooks could, of course, still be had for cheaper (though if you start configuring the specs to be comparable to the Neo, that price gap does narrow a bit).
That said, I would argue that one aspect the MacBook Neo has going for it is that Apple Silicon has proved to have surprising longevity behind it. I recently handed down my M1 MacBook Air to my dad; that’s an almost six year old computer that I’d probably still be using if it weren’t for me running up against the drive limit, and which will no doubt serve him just fine for years to come.
I’d expect no less from the Neo, and if you amortize the cost of that $500 machine out over the lifetime of the product, you’ve got a better deal yet. (I’d also argue that the aluminum chassis of the MacBook Neo seems more likely to take a beating over the long run than a plastic Chromebook, but of course, your mileage may vary.)
But this is all beside the point. Because Apple’s strategy these days is, as I said, is about playing to its strength—and its strength is appealing not at the institutional level, but to the individual consumer. By playing to customers who might want to buy a computer for educational purposes, say for a high school student or a kid heading off to college, Apple capitalizes on the strength of its existing ecosystem and the cachet of its brand.
The MacBook Neo, after all, works seamlessly with your iPhone or your AirPods; it hooks into the Apple account you probably already have. Maybe it even runs the same apps. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that it looks cool, sleek, and colorful—unlike many a Chromebook.
Like Apple’s classic halo effect, which saw Mac sales benefit from the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, the more people using Macs for their own personal uses in education translates, if not into direct institutional sales, then at least into prevalence that can’t be ignored.
This is a considerably better situation than in my school days too: the rise of the internet and its platform agnostic nature has, fortunately, largely done away with the compatibility struggles of the ’90s and 2000s when you had to worry more about whether your organization would even support your device of choice. Not only does your MacBook Neo work at least as well as a Chromebook does with the buzziest technology—such as ChatGPT or Claude—it’s got the potential to leverage the power of Apple Silicon there, which is definitely no slouch.
The MacBook Neo isn’t the only move that Apple’s made towards the education market in recent months, either. Take the recently launched Apple Creator Studio bundle, which offers a slew of apps for all sorts of creative applications, and which is extremely aggressive priced for education users: $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.
Again, those apps aren’t aimed at institutional buyers so much as they are the individual user. And by getting more students to be comfortable with these affordable and accessible tools, Apple helps ensure that the next generation is well versed in its apps—thus, potentially, making them more popular than ever.
Look, I don’t expect to see large swaths of institutions plunking down money for crates of MacBook Neos—and, as someone who used to work in technology higher education, I’m well aware that process is glacial at the best of times. But the point of Apple’s strategy is that it doesn’t need to wait for those big institutional decisions; it can approach the education market bottom up. Once upon a time, people might have been forced to use whatever technology their schools had—these days, we all have technology with us all the time. We love CarPlay, for example, because it lets us bring our phones with us rather than relying on a system force-fed to us by an automaker. It’s no surprise this generation wants to use its own tech in learning too.
And, frankly, a $499 MacBook Neo with $29.99/year subscription to Apple Creator Studio is a pretty compelling offering. I won’t be surprised to see more and more individual students firing up Logic or Final Cut Pro on their citrus MacBooks next fall.
2026-03-05 03:59:57
Checking in with “The Sims,” whether hardware colors sway our buying choices, Apple’s new pricing strategy with the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo, and whether the Studio Display XDR is a bad deal.
2026-03-04 23:23:52
The rumors are true: Apple has announced a new, low-price MacBook based on an A-series processor. It’s the MacBook Neo and it starts at $599, the lowest price ever for a new Mac laptop.
This product is the result of Apple’s manufacturing ability and the rise of Apple silicon. With Intel processors, the MacBook Air has basically occupied the bottom limit of what Apple would consider acceptable performance for a Mac. But even the original M1 MacBook Air still offers solid performance, and the A series chips primarily used in iPhones have kept getting better alongside them. The MacBook Neo is the outcome: Apple can now sell a capable laptop below the MacBook Air, powered by the same A18 Pro processor found in the iPhone 16 Pro.
For $599—keep in mind, the cheapest standard price for any new Mac was $499 for a Mac mini—you get a complete 13-inch laptop that shares a family resemblance (right down to the rounded corners) with the rest of the MacBook product line. (The education price is $499!) The base model doesn’t offer Touch ID and only has 256GB of storage, but there’s also a $699 model with 512GB storage and Touch ID.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the colors: Apple has dropped its longstanding moratorium on bright colors on Mac laptops. The Neo comes in silver, yes, but also blush, indigo, and citrus. I’ve seen them all in person, so let me translate: Blush is pink enough that even I, a person who has a hard time seeing pinks, can tell that it’s pink. Indigo is sort of like the MacBook Air’s Midnight color lightened up a few notches. And citrus is a bright yellow-gold that nobody is going to mistake for some other Apple laptop.
No $599 Mac laptop is going to exist without compromises, but they’re surprisingly minimal, in my opinion. (And I’ll point out that if they’re too much for a potential buyer, the MacBook Air is right there.) There’s no MagSafe charging or Thunderbolt, but there are two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. That USB-C port is capable of driving 4K external video at 60 frames per second. Both models offer only 8GB of RAM, which is enough to run Apple Intelligence but is shy of the MacBook Air’s 16GB base.
If you’re wondering if an iPhone processor can really drive a Mac, let me reprint this chart that I posted last year:
In short, that A18 CPU core is fast. That will carry the day for the MacBook Neo, and I’d call multi-core and GPU performance “good enough,” certainly for a $599 laptop. (Of course, we’ll see how the MacBook Neo actually performs once we get our hands on one for extended testing and review.)
In introducing the MacBook Neo at an Apple event in New York City, Apple VP of Hardware John Ternus emphasized that nearly half of all Macs Apple sells are to people new to the Mac. If you look at the MacBook Neo product page you’ll see that Apple is well aware that a $599 laptop allows it to address a market that may have never really considered buying a Mac before. In addition to establishing that it’s a bona fide, full-features Mac, there’s a prominent “Switch from PC to Mac” element.
It’s also clear that Apple’s attempts to use the iPad as a way into that part of the market, most notably education, have been limited. The MacBook Neo gives Apple a traditional computer (complete with display, keyboard, and pointing device) to sell into that market. That $499 education price is really aggressive. Apple’s never going to win on price alone in any market—it’s not the game they play—but this puts them in the mix more than an iPad-keyboard combo or an education-priced MacBook Air.
The last few years, Apple has been selling an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for very low prices. It was a curious choice and Apple hasn’t really talked much about it, but it sure seemed like the company was testing the viability of selling laptops into a never-before-seen price point. Was that all a test of viability for the MacBook Neo? Either way, this new laptop may very well bring the Mac to an entirely new set of users who would have never considered buying a Mac before. That’s very exciting.
2026-03-04 08:45:13
One of the most surprising parts of Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models was its decision to change how it describes the two different types of CPU cores in its processors.
What’s in a name? It’s really a marketing decision, more than anything else. And most people will not care, or even notice. But those of us who pay close attention to this stuff will notice, and you may be hearing about it from us for some time to come.
Here’s what happened:
Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!
Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those cores are marketing to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency. Which is fine on its face, but by re-using an existing term of art, it’s going to be a bit confusing when it comes time to explain what’s going on. I wonder if Apple should’ve come up with two different names for these cores, rather than recycling one of them.
Leaving the naming aside, a new performance-nee-efficiency core design is actually great news. Apple doesn’t iterate every aspect of its chips every time, but chooses different bits to upgrade—and the power-efficient cores got the big update with the high-end M5 generation. The “super” cores really are meant to be used for peak workloads, and a huge amount of the everyday life of a Mac doesn’t need to tap that power. Also, presumably these new cores will also crop up on the base M6 chips next year, making them appreciably better than the base M5.
In the end, I suspect this is entirely a marketing issue: Apple didn’t think the lesser of the two core types was getting its due, and I understand why. In a few years maybe none of us will flinch when we read about a chip with so many super cores and so many performance cores. Not today, though.
One last, tangential observation: Apple announced its new Fusion Architecture today as well, which allows the company to mix and match different “chiplets” in a single package. This is another esoteric chip thing (is there any other kind?) but it has real ramifications for the future of Apple’s chip designs. It means that Apple can be a bit more modular with its designs, building a standard CPU set (for the M5 Max and Pro) while offering two different GPU variants with 20 (Pro) and 40 (Max) cores. I’m also curious what this means for a future Ultra chip, assuming there will be one whenever the M5 Mac Studio is announced.
2026-03-04 00:00:00
We forgot to get Dan a 20th anniversary present, Lex misses interrupting things and Moltz claims he doesn’t print all the phasers.
2026-03-03 23:17:26
On Tuesday Apple updated the MacBook Air, its most popular Mac laptop, by adding the M5 chip it introduced last fall.
Beyond the new chip, the M5 MacBook Air is very much the same as last year’s M4 MacBook Air. It does get Apple’s new N1 chip, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and improved memory bandwidth of 153GB/s. But the primary changes are in two areas: price and storage.
The base-model M5 Air starts at 512GB of storage, twice what the base-model M4 Air offered. But in true Apple fashion, that generous spec bump comes at a price. Literally. The M5 Air’s starting price is $1099 ($999 for education), $100 more than the M4 Air’s $999 base price.
When Apple raises base prices, this is generally how it does it. Just last year, it raised the base price of the iPhone 17 Pro by $100 but also doubled the onboard storage. So you get more, but you don’t have an option to pay less and get less.
It’s a little disappointing, since Apple had finally gotten back to that magic sub-$1000 non-education price for the MacBook Air. Perhaps, as rumors suggest, Apple has another low-cost laptop on the way that provides it some cover to increase the base price of the MacBook Air. We’ll see.
