A faster MacBook stuck behind a price increase that has nothing to do with anything Apple built.
Apple's newest MacBook doesn't waste time telling you where the money went. Open the box on the MacBook Neo and the first thing you notice isn't the screen or the keyboard, it's the price: $1,999 to start, four hundred dollars more than the M5 MacBook Pro it replaces at the same 14-inch size, the biggest single-generation jump in Apple's laptop lineup in years.
The reason lives in the memory chips, not the processor, and it's worth understanding because it explains laptop prices well beyond Apple this year. Data-center demand for high-bandwidth memory has been eating the same DRAM and NAND production lines consumer machines rely on, and Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have all shifted capacity toward the more profitable server parts. Apple is just the company everyone notices raising prices first. The base 16GB configuration here costs what 8GB did two years ago, and the 512GB-to-1TB storage jump is now $300, up from $200 on the outgoing model. None of this is anything Apple built. All of it is what you're paying for.
“The chip inside is the best Apple has ever put in a laptop. The price is the worst deal Apple has offered in years, and that's not really Apple's fault.”
The chip itself is excellent, and I say that with a spreadsheet open. The Neo pushes multi-core about 20 percent past the M5 on the strength of a redesigned memory controller, and my standard test, a 25-minute 4K Final Cut export, finished in just under six minutes against nine and a half on my M5 unit, fans barely audible. Fourteen hours of real work per charge, calls and editing and tab abuse, not the spec-sheet number.
Everything around the chip is deliberately unchanged: same unibody, same 1,600-nit Liquid Retina XDR panel, same no-notes keyboard and trackpad, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, SD slot, MagSafe. Nothing about this purchase is visible from across the room.
Two petty grievances survived my first week. Base storage stays at 512GB despite the price hike, and the box still ships the same 70-watt brick from two generations ago even though the Neo pulls more under full load. Both read like line items from the same spreadsheet that set the new starting price.
Here's the advice I've been giving friends, and it's the first time I've said this about a new Mac in years: buy the old one. Anyone not compiling large codebases, editing 4K weekly, or running local models should be at a retailer clearing M5 MacBook Pro stock at a discount, pocketing the difference, and losing nothing they'd ever feel. The Neo is for people whose time the extra speed measurably buys back. I ran the export numbers for my own work, twice, and I'm keeping the M5.
The best laptop chip Apple has ever shipped arrived in the worst quarter to buy a laptop. Nobody at Apple chose that, and it's still the review.