MacBook Neo Pre-Orders at Best Buy Include Free $25 Gift Card

The discounts have begun. By Black Friday these will be available for $449. Opens Apple to an entire market they never had before. It's like if BMW made a new vehicle for $25,000 in this decade.

Yes there was a Mac mini, but that's $600 without a keyboard/mouse/display and isn't mobile. This is the ultimate gift for someone who doesn't need Air/Pro level equipment.

This Mac has to beat the $500 POS Windows plastic trash sitting on a shelf next to it at Walmart or Costco or Target, not a $1100 MacBook Air or a $2200 MacBook Pro. And it will.

$25 won't make up for this atrocity.

$25 won't make up for this atrocity.

All this says to me is just how serious they were about keeping cost as low as possible. Otherwise, they would have both been USB 3. Obviously.

The target audience for a MacBook Neo will not care in the least about these port differences. I may. You may. But we're not the target. So...

Yeah, and why nerf it with max 512GB?

Less SKUs for Apple.

So, I realize this is one simple anecdotal example, but the specs on this seem to be in the absolute sweet spot for a lot of day to day Macbook users that aren't coders, gamers, designers or videophiles. My (adult) kid is in the theatre business. She's constantly recording audition tapes, downloading and reading scripts, emailing, and browsing. And that's pretty much it. and you might ask...what about the audition tapes? Well, those are done entirely on her iPhone or iPad. She doesn't need a ton of storage because all of her files are in the cloud. She barely would even use it to browse through photos.

It actually comes at an absolutely perfect time for her, too. Her very old and underutilized MBPro screen crapped the bed, and it would cost more to fix that than it would to buy a new Neo. And, she can get it in pink.

And as for comparing it to PC specs...the last time she used a PC was in elementary school.

Sounds perfect for her and also the majority of the market. MacRumors users forget they are in the minority. Most Apple customers are not like us here. Hope she enjoys it!

The discounts have begun. By Black Friday these will be available for $449. Opens Apple to an entire market they never had before.

Which is the whole point, and something missed by many posters; not everyone needs a lot of power.

It's like if BMW made a new vehicle for $25,000 in this decade.

Sig me up, a successor to the '02.

My point is not that the Apple laptop is too expensive; for an Apple laptop I think $499 is right where it should be. But I don’t think it’s a bargain or anything like that; it’s competitive with lower end PC offerings, and, of course, destroyed performance-wise/price-wise by anyone willing to put in the legwork to work a deal on the PC side.

Maybe, but for people who want a Mac but balked tax the price this can be a compelling offering, especially since I suspect it will regularly be discounted. It will be interesting to see what Back to School promo it gets.

Wish they had one in green to remind of a turtle. That is how fast this computer will perform with 8gb RAM.

Sometimes, a turtle is fast enough to win the race. For the target market, 8GB will do the job; no one is buying this thinking the can run huge spreadsheets or LLMs natively on it.

What I find interesting is the argument "Apple should turn the iPhone in to a dockable computer" becomes "It's useless...an atrocity...etc." when they essentially turn an iPhone into a Mac.