A faster MacBook stuck behind a price increase that has nothing to do with anything Apple built.
I went into the store expecting to walk out with one of these and walked out with nothing, which hasn't happened to me at an Apple store in about a decade. The MacBook Neo starts at $1,999, four hundred dollars more than the M5 MacBook Pro it replaces at the same 14-inch size, and that's the biggest single-generation jump in Apple's laptop lineup in years. The first thing you notice on opening the box has nothing to do with the screen or the keyboard.
The reason sits in the memory chips rather than the processor, and it's worth following 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 that consumer machines rely on, and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have all shifted capacity toward the more profitable server parts, so Apple is simply the company everybody 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 where it was $200 on the outgoing model. None of that is something Apple designed or built, which doesn't change the number on the tag, and I watched three PC makers do the same thing far more quietly in the same quarter.
“The best laptop chip Apple has ever shipped turned up in the worst quarter to buy a laptop.”
The chip itself is excellent and I say that with a spreadsheet open in front of me. 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, with the fans barely audible either time. It gave me fourteen hours of real work per charge, calls and editing and an unreasonable number of tabs, rather than the spec-sheet figure.
Everything around the chip is deliberately unchanged, the same unibody, the same 1,600-nit Liquid Retina XDR panel, the same no-notes keyboard and trackpad, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SD slot and MagSafe, so nothing about this purchase is visible from across a room. Two petty grievances survived my first week with it. 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.
The advice I've been giving friends is to buy the old one, which is the first time I've said that about a new Mac in years. Anybody not compiling large codebases, editing 4K weekly or running local models should be at a retailer clearing M5 MacBook Pro stock at a discount and pocketing the difference, because the Neo is for people whose time that extra speed measurably buys back. I ran the export numbers for my own work twice and I'm keeping the M5, and I couldn't tell you whether prices come back down next year or settle here for good, because every analyst I read said something different and the two I trusted most flatly disagreed with each other. I've put a price alert on the clearance stock and I check it more often than I'd like to admit, which is definately not a healthy way to buy a computer.