A genuinely faster MacBook held back by a price increase that has nothing to do with what Apple actually built.
Apple's newest MacBook doesn't waste any 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 tag: $1,999 to start, four hundred dollars more than the M5 MacBook Pro it replaces at the same 14-inch size. That's the biggest single-generation jump in Apple's laptop lineup in years, and it isn't hiding behind a longer feature list.
The chip inside earns some of that increase on its own merits. The new Neo chip pushes multi-core performance about 20 percent past the M5, mostly from a redesigned memory controller that keeps the extra unified memory fed instead of starved, and it does that while running cooler under sustained loads than I expected. Exporting a 25-minute 4K timeline in Final Cut Pro finished in just under six minutes, down from nine and a half on my old M5 unit, and the fans barely spun up doing it. Battery life holds at a genuine 14 hours of real work, video calls, editing, a dozen open tabs, not just the number on the spec sheet.
“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.”
Everything around that chip is deliberately unchanged. Same aluminum unibody, same Liquid Retina XDR display peaking at 1,600 nits, same keyboard and trackpad that have needed zero notes for three generations running. Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, full-size HDMI, an SD card slot, and MagSafe all carry over, which is Apple's way of saying the case for buying this one has nothing to do with anything you can see from across the room.
The real story is sitting inside the memory chips, not the processor. Demand for the high-bandwidth memory used in AI data centers has been eating into the same DRAM and NAND flash production lines that laptop makers rely on, and Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have all shifted capacity toward the more profitable server-grade parts over the past year. That's squeezed consumer memory supply hard enough that Apple isn't the only one raising prices, it's just the one everyone notices first. The base 16GB configuration here costs what 8GB did two years ago, and the jump from 512GB to 1TB storage now runs $300, up from $200 on the outgoing model.
Whether that's worth paying depends entirely on what you do with the machine. Anyone compiling large codebases, editing 4K or 6K footage regularly, or running local AI models will feel the extra memory bandwidth and the faster chip in ways that save real time every week. Everyone else, the people mostly living in a browser and a couple of apps, would be better off buying a discounted M5 MacBook Pro while retailers are still clearing that stock, or waiting for memory prices to come back down.
A few smaller frustrations stuck with me past the first week. Base storage is still stuck at 512GB despite the price hike, which feels stingy given what Apple charges to move past it, and the included charging brick is still the same 70-watt unit from two generations back even though the Neo chip can pull noticeably more under full load. Neither is a dealbreaker, but they read like decisions made by the same spreadsheet that set the new starting price.
The MacBook Neo is a genuinely better laptop than the one it replaces, built around a chip that deserves the praise it's getting. It's just arriving at the worst possible moment for anyone hoping memory prices had already peaked, and that's a harder thing to forgive than any spec Apple could have shipped instead.