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.
We’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.
MacBook Neo
The 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.
iPhone 17e
The 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.
M4 iPad Air
The 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.
M5 MacBook Air
Apple 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.
With the bump in base storage comes a higher base price. Now, the MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch. $1,099 is actually $100 cheaper than what it would've cost to upgrade to a 512GB SSD in the M4 MacBook Air. So it's still a good deal, especially as costs for RAM and storage have seen stark increases lately, owed to the voracious appetite of AI firms.
M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros
The 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.
Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
Apple announced two new, very expensive 27-inch displays. The 5K Studio Display is the $1,599 follow-up to the company’s 2022 model, albeit with apparently only minor changes: It now has two Thunderbolt 5 ports (one upstream, one downstream for daisy-chaining displays or adding accessories like Thunderbolt docks), and it now supports the Desk View part of Apple’s Center Stage webcam feature. That means now the camera doesn’t just follow you, it’s wide enough to switch it to show what your hands are doing, too.
The Studio Display XDR is where the real action is, thanks to the addition of a high-contrast mini-LED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and up to 1,000 nits SDR brightness or 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness. Features are otherwise nearly identical, except that it gets Apple’s tilt-and-height-adjustible stand by default rather than the simple tilt-only one of the normal Studio Display. Oh, and it costs $3,299 to start ($3,599 if you want the anti-reflective Nano-texture glass). That price would make it hard for this display to beat dedicated gaming monitors, the best of which can cost thousands less.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn't be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
