I met MacBook Neo. Everything I know is a lie

There’s a famous scene in The Matrix just before Neo takes the red pill from Morpheus, where the latter is explaining what the Matrix is. He tells Neo that the world he lives in is a construct, and the red pill will disrupt the simulation and reveal the truth.

Apple’s new MacBook Neo is the red pill. Had I not known the price before I picked one up, I would have guessed it cost at least $799 and possibly $999, depending on the specs. It doesn’t just disrupt that laptop landscape with a machine that has no right to exist in the budget market. It changes everything people think they know about Apple.

Picking it up feels just as premium as a MacBook Air. The Neo is made of what feels like the same aluminum as Apple’s high-end laptop, although its array of colors—Citrus (yellow), Blush (pink), Indigo (dark blue), and silver—gives a playful vibe. But make no mistake, it’s built for serious work.

For the first time since the iBook, the keyboard (which has the same bouncy Magic Keyboard feel as the Air) isn’t black, but they’re not totally white either. They have a tint that matches the case color when they catch the light, one of the premium touches that belies the $599 starting price.

Open the screen on a table with one finger, and the body won’t lift up like so many plastic PCs and Chromebooks. Start typing, and your fingers will fly around the keys. Play a video and the side-firing speakers will immerse you in sound. Raise the brightness, and the 13-inch Liquid Retina display will shine. Pinch the multi-touch trackpad, and it’ll feel like you’re using an iPhone. 

We’ll need to test the A18 Pro processor to see if it can withstand the pressures of a hard benchmarking session, but that’s not really going to matter for its target market. Neither will the 8GB of RAM or 256GB of storage. This is a machine built to defy conventions, to make people think they’re using a thousand-dollar laptop when, in fact, they only spent a fraction of that.

Michael Simon / Foundry

Down the rabbit hole

For as long as I’ve been using and writing about iPhones and MacBooks, there’s been a notion that Apple users are foolishly paying a tax to a company that charges extra because it can. Even as its competitors made thousand-dollar smartphones and all-aluminum laptops that cost just as much, Apple has never been able to shake the reputation that its users are blindly overpaying for pretty devices that don’t measure up.

The MacBook Neo doesn’t just dispel that notion, it upends the entire philosophy that Apple is a brand for foolish rich people who don’t know better. I’m writing this on an M3 Max MacBook Pro and my mind is still back at the MacBook Neo table. There’s no turning back.

When I walked over to the MacBook Pro table at the Apple experience, I had my pick of machines because no one else was there. They had all taken the red pill.