The MacBook Neo launched on March 4, pre-orders went live the same evening, and it ships on March 11. Apple is using the phrase “breakthrough price,” which, if you’ve followed Apple long enough, is the corporate equivalent of a five-star restaurant putting a vada pav on the menu and calling it “accessible dining.” Two storage options: 256GB at ₹69,900 or 512GB at ₹79,900.
Education pricing brings the base down to ₹59,900, and that’s your lot — 8GB RAM across the board, no other memory configurations, no customisation. The Asus VivoBook crowd is who Apple is after here, and for the first time in a long while, the price makes that a realistic conversation.
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The Chip Is From Your iPhone
The MacBook Neo doesn’t run an M-series chip. It runs the A18 Pro — the same one sitting inside the iPhone 16 Pro right now. Same chip, different box. Apple pulled it from their phone lineup, put it inside a laptop chassis, and kept the costs down by manufacturing it at the same enormous iPhone-scale volumes.
On paper the A18 Pro isn’t weak — 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 60GB/s memory bandwidth. Apple’s own numbers claim 50 percent faster everyday performance than a bestselling Intel Core Ultra 5 Windows laptop, which, honestly, isn’t hard given how mediocre most of those Windows machines are at this price. The three-times-faster AI workloads claim is real too, for whatever that’s worth to the average person buying a sub-₹70,000 laptop. Day to day — tabs, YouTube, assignments, the odd Teams call — this chip is fine. More than fine, actually.
The trouble starts when you look one shelf up. The M4 MacBook Air — bumped to previous-gen status on the very day the Neo launched, because Apple also announced the M5 Air on March 4 — runs a 10-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, and 120GB/s of memory bandwidth. That’s double what the Neo has. The M2 Air, sitting at roughly ₹68,990 right now, has an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU pushing 100GB/s — and that machine came out in 2022.
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Apps — No Issues Here
Every macOS app that runs on any MacBook Air runs on the Neo the same way. Same App Store, no fine print, no exceptions. iOS and iPadOS apps work too — the A18 Pro shares the same ARM architecture as the M-series chips, so it clears that bar without any trouble. There’s actually a decent case that iOS apps run more naturally on the Neo than on any M-series Mac, since the A18 Pro is family with the same chips that power iPhones.
Apple hasn’t said this, but it’s not a stretch. Where you start feeling the A18 Pro’s phone DNA isn’t in what apps you can open — it’s in how the machine holds up when those apps are all working hard at once. DaVinci Resolve, a big Lightroom catalogue, anything GPU-hungry. For lectures, assignments, and browser tabs, though, it’s not going to skip a beat.
The Display Gap Nobody’s Talking About
The Neo’s 13-inch Liquid Retina screen — 2408×1506, 219 PPI, 500 nits — is a good screen. Better than most things in the sub-₹70,000 Windows world, where you’re often stuck with a panel that makes everything look slightly grey and sad. There’s an anti-reflective coating on it too, which sounds like a throwaway detail until you’ve spent a full afternoon trying to work with a window behind you and a glare rendering half your screen invisible.
The M3 and M4 MacBook Airs both run 13.6-inch panels at 2560×1664, and both have P3 wide colour, which the Neo doesn’t — it caps at sRGB. Side by side the Air’s display just looks more alive, the way a good print looks different from a photocopy of it. Colours land with more depth, skin tones in photos look like skin tones.
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8GB RAM. In 2026. Seriously.
Apple got absolutely hammered for putting 8GB in the base M2 MacBook Air back in 2022. Not just by tech reviewers — regular buyers were vocal about it, comment sections were brutal, and even people who knew nothing about memory architecture had somehow absorbed that 8GB was not enough. It took until the M4 Air in 2025 for Apple to quietly bump the standard to 16GB, at which point the complaints mostly stopped.
For 2026 daily use, 8GB on the A18 Pro gets by. Apple’s unified memory architecture is more efficient than what you’d get on a Windows machine with the same spec, and for the tasks this laptop is meant for, it won’t constantly feel tight. The problem isn’t this year — it’s 2029, when the student who bought this in March is two jobs deep and wondering why everything feels slow.
One thing that didn’t make the headlines: Touch ID is only on the 512GB model. Buy the base ₹69,900 version and there’s no fingerprint sensor in the keyboard — you’re typing your password like it’s 2015. This isn’t how any MacBook Air works; Touch ID is standard on all of them regardless of what storage you pick.
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That USB 2 Port, Though
So the Neo has two USB-C ports. Sounds fine until you learn that one of them is USB 2 — the one running at 480Mbps, the speed standard from back when people had Limewire on their family desktop and thought they were getting away with something. Plug your external SSD into that port by mistake and you’re in for a long wait, the kind where you walk away, make chai, come back, and it’s still going. The other port is USB 3 at 10Gbps, which is decent. But no Thunderbolt anywhere on this machine, no MagSafe, no SD card slot — nothing.
Every MacBook Air from the M3 onwards has Thunderbolt ports — Thunderbolt 3 on the M3, Thunderbolt 4 on the M4, both USB 4, both running at up to 40Gbps — and a separate MagSafe port sitting alongside them so you never have to unplug your hard drive just to charge.
Battery and Build Are Genuinely Strong
When it comes to battery, 16 hours video streaming and 11 hours web browsing per Apple’s January 2026 pre-production testing. Knock a bit off for real-world use — always do — and the Neo still runs circles around most Windows laptops at this price, which are lucky to hit eight or nine honest hours. The M4 Air claims 18 hours, which sounds better, but in practice, the difference between 16 and 18 hours is something you will never actually notice. Both last all day. Battery is a genuine Neo strength.
The build is where the Neo earns some of its price back. It’s 1.23kg, 1.27cm thin, completely silent — no fan anywhere — and the aluminium chassis uses 60 percent recycled content, more than any other Apple product currently. The colour options are Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo, and the keyboard picks up a lighter wash of whichever shade you go for — Indigo keyboard on Indigo body, Citrus keys on a Citrus lid.
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So, Should You Buy It?
Against anything Windows offers at ₹69,900 — yes, buy the Neo. Better build, longer battery, better software, fewer headaches over time. Not a complicated call.
The complicated call is the M4 MacBook Air. It’s now previous-gen, sitting around ₹86,990 on Amazon, and that price is only going one direction as M5 stock fills the shelves. For roughly ₹17,000 more than the base Neo, you get 16GB RAM, double the memory bandwidth, a P3 display, Thunderbolt 4, and MagSafe. The M3 Air is around ₹89,990. The M2 Air is even more affordable (if you can find it in stock) — the Neo’s price, with Thunderbolt connectivity.
Apple launching the M5 Air on the same day as the Neo was not an accident — it turned the M4 into a discount machine overnight, and the discounted M4 Air is probably the best value MacBook in India right now.
Gorgeous colours. A USB 2 port that belongs in a museum. Battery that actually delivers. 8GB RAM you’ll start resenting sometime around 2028. If the M4 Air on discount is within reach, that’s the smarter buy.
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MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M4 — Base Model Specs
| MacBook Neo | MacBook Air M4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Chip | A18 Pro (6-core CPU / 5-core GPU) | M4 (10-core CPU / 8-core GPU base) |
| Memory bandwidth | 60GB/s | 120GB/s |
| RAM | 8GB (non-upgradeable) | 16GB standard |
| Display | 13″ · 219 PPI · sRGB | 13.6″ · 224 PPI · P3 wide colour |
| Ports | 1× USB 3 + 1× USB 2 + 3.5mm | 2× Thunderbolt 4 + MagSafe + 3.5mm |
| Battery (video) | Up to 16 hrs | Up to 18 hrs |
| Touch ID | Only on the 512GB model | All models |
| India price (base) | ₹69,900 | ~₹86,990 (discounted; M5 now current) |
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