Every once in a while, Tim Cook and his minions stand on the roof or lurk around the grounds of the Apple spaceship, all wearing sneakers that cost more than my house, and tell us that they have “reinvented the future.” Usually, this involves moving a button three millimetres to the left or making a phone slightly more rectangular.
Last week’s “Spring Event” was no different. We were treated to a parade of what I call “The Glistening Pointless.”
First, they showed us the new MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip. It’s faster, they say, and it’s definitely a laptop for people who spend their lives “rendering” things. If you aren’t currently designing a nuclear reactor or editing a Hollywood blockbuster in your spare room, you do not need this.
Then there was the Studio Display and XDR. The cheapest one costs $2.599 and the best one – $5499. For a monitor!
Apple justifies this small hatchback price tag because it has “2,000 nits of peak brightness,” but unless you’re planning to do your spreadsheets while sitting on the surface of the sun, you don’t need a screen that can blind a passing hawk. Sure, this kind of thing is a Godsend for some professionals, but what about the rest of us mere mortals?
Then, amongst the sea of overpriced glass and “Pro” nonsense, there was one product that actually made me stop shouting at the television. The MacBook Neo.
It starts from $899 and goes up to $1099 for the top version. Its nearest equivalent in the Apple stable is $800 more. And for the first time in a decade, Apple has built something that feels… honest. It’s not trying to be a digital spaceship. It’s just a computer. And a good one at that.
It uses the A18 Pro chip—the same one from the iPhone 16 Pro. Now, some tech-nerds are crying into their soy lattes because it’s a “phone chip.” But here’s the thing: that chip is more powerful than the supercomputers that put men on the moon. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and because it doesn’t get hot, the Neo doesn’t have a fan. It’s silent. It’s like a well-trained butler—it just does the job without making a fuss.
It lasts sixteen hours. That means you can open it on a flight from Sydney to Japan, work on your memoirs, watch three films, and still have enough power to check your emails when you land. No more frantic searching for a plug socket like a drug addict looking for a fix.
They’ve released it in actual colours— a hark back no doubt to the original colour iBooks of the early 2000s. I’m looking at the “Citrus” version, which is a sort of lime-yellow. It’s hideous, and I love it. It’s not the boring, corporate “Space Grey” that makes every office look like a Victorian prison. It’s fun.
In a world of “haptic feedback” (which is just a fancy way of saying “pretending to click”), the Neo has a trackpad that actually moves when you press it. It’s tactile. It’s mechanical. It’s satisfying in the same way a heavy-duty light switch is.
The MacBook Neo is the only thing Apple released last week that matters for those of us that aren’t Hollywood editors or graphic designers. It’s built for students, for people who write for a living, and for anyone who is sick of being told they need to spend three grand to check their bank balance.
It’s a bit like a sturdy pair of leather boots. It isn’t trying to fly and it won’t cook your dinner. It just works. And in 2026, that is a genuine miracle.
Skip the $3,000 torch they’re calling a monitor. Buy the Neo, spend the change on a decent bottle of gin, and thank me later.
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