The MacBook Neo and Everything Else Apple Announced This Week

The MacBook Neo and Everything Else Apple Announced This Week Southeast Asia Home Amazon Deals Pro-tips by Codashop PC PS4 Xbox One Nintendo Mobile Entertainment EsportsMoreSearch Home More About IGN SEAContactAdvertisePressUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyRSSIGN Southeast Asia is operated under license by Media Prima Digital Sdn Bhd (199901014126) Change Region United States United Kingdom Australia Africa Adria Serbian/Croatian Adria Slovenian Benelux / Dutch Brazil China / 中国 Czechia / Slovakia France Germany Greece / Ελλάδα Hungary India Israel Italy / Italia Japan / 日本 Korea / 한국 Latin America Middle East – English Middle East – الأوسطالشرق Nordic Poland Portugal Southeast Asia Spain / España Turkey / Türkiye world.ign.com Register / Login Register / Login Login Register Apple iPad Air The MacBook Neo and Everything Else Apple Announced This Week Apple’s big week of new product reveals ended with a bang. This post might contain affiliation links. If you buy something through this post, the publisher may get a share of the sale. By Wes Davis  Updated: March 5, 2026, 4:52 a.m. Related reads:MapleStorySEA Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Massive Summer Updates In lieu of a polished livestream of a heavily produced, pre-recorded announcement of new stuff, Apple spread out a series of announcements across three days of press releases that culminated in small, invite-only events in a few different cities this week. The biggest news from all of that: The company rolled out its first new Mac laptop product line for the first time since 2015’s plain MacBook. The MacBook Neo is a $599 laptop that comes in multiple vibrant colors and is powered by the chipset of the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. It’s also one of the cheapest machines the company has ever released and it’s landed with impeccable timing, given the supply chain that feeds all of our tech is being gobbled up to feed the great AI beast.More like thisOpen Back Headphones: A Sound Experience Like No OtherWe’ll get into the Neo, but that’s not everything Apple announced this week. We also saw new MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, the iPhone 17e, an M4-equipped iPad Air, and two new displays from the Cupertino Crusher. (I’m sorry, that’s a terrible nickname.) You won’t find a powerful new gaming laptop here, nor will the MacBook Neo make our list of budget gaming laptops, although that’s not necessarily for lack of oomph. The new MacBook Pros will be plenty powerful; it’s just that the industry, broadly, still doesn’t make games for Macs.The MacBook Neo.MacBook NeoThe new MacBook Neo is Apple’s cheapest brand-new laptop, ever, thanks to certain strategic omissions and the inclusion of the A18 Pro chip that Apple put in its iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max phones. With a starting price of $599, it’s still on the high end of budget laptops, but it’s also only a bit more than half the price of the company’s next-cheapest laptop, the MacBook Air. Not only that, but it comes in four colors – Silver, Indigo (blue), Citrus (a yellowish green), and Blush (pink). Specs-wise, it’s definitely a lower-end device than the MacBook Air, but should be more than sufficient for most casual use and even some professional applications. It has a 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine, Apple’s name for its neural processor. It’s got 8GB of RAM, which is piddly for a laptop these days but seems enough to run the company’s AI “Apple Intelligence” features, which the company says will work on it. The iPhone 17eiPhone 17eThe iPhone 17e is Apple’s next budget iPhone, and it’s got the right improvements versus last year’s iPhone 16e, mainly in the power department. Where last year the $599 phone lacked MagSafe and was limited to 7.5W wireless charging, this year’s model will get 15W charging with MagSafe. Apple also added a new color to the lineup: Pink joins the black and white color options that were offered before. The 17e also gets a bump to the A19 and the inclusion of Apple’s C1X modem that Apple says will be double the speed of the C1 found in the iPhone 16e. Otherwise, it’s more of the same. That means a 48MP single rear camera with 2x “optical-quality” digital zoom, a 12MP front camera, and a 6.1-inch 60Hz display with a notch instead of the Dynamic Island pill-shaped cutout from the rest of the iPhone 17 line. Still, the improvements are notable given that the previous model didn’t quite make our list of favorite smartphones. The M4 iPad Air.M4 iPad AirThe newest iPad Air gets an M4 chip, a bump from the M3 that was in the previous-generation model. In addition to the chip bump, the new iPad will also be the tablet proving ground for the company’s N1 chip, a custom wireless chip that brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and a Thread radio to the device. The cellular iPad Air will use Apple’s C1X 5G modem, to boot. Spec bump though it may be, this will be a powerful tablet, with an 8-core CPU, 9-core GPU, and 16-core NPU. Apple says it’s “up to 30 percent faster” than the M3 iPad Air, which is already one of the best tablets around. It gets 12GB of RAM, up from 8GB, comes in 11-inch and 13-inch models, and keeps its usual starting price of $599.The M5 MacBook Air.M5 MacBook AirApple also updated its MacBook Air line with a new entrant, now equipped with an M5 chip. Mostly a spec bump available in the same four colors, the laptop still got a couple significant changes. For starters, the base storage is now 512GB, and it’s got Apple’s custom N1 chip, which means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. Apple didn’t raise the price of the Air, which makes it a better deal than past models as components costs for RAM and storage have seen stark increases lately, owed to the voracious appetite of AI firms. That means the new MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch.The M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pro.M5 Pro and Max MacBook ProsThe M5 chip made its first laptop debut in the base model MacBook Pro last year, but the higher-end versions of the chip, the M5 Pro and M5 Max, have only just emerged this week, in the form of new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops. The laptops get similar CPU and GPU core counts as before, but now Apple is touting “super” cores that are even more powerful – so much so that the company has gotten rid of efficiency cores on these new Pro models, replacing them with performance cores, instead.Unlike the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pros got a price bump. They’ll start at $1,699 for the base M5 MacBook Pro (a $100 jump), $2,199 for the M5 Pro MacBook Pro (up by $200), and $3,599 for the M5 Max MacBook Pro ($400 more than before). With that, though, they get a storage bump, as Apple has dropped the 512GB tier and now starts MacBook Pros with at least 1TB SSDs. The new laptops also get Apple’s N1 chip.The Studio Display and Studio Display XDRStudio Display and Stud