MacBook Neo at Six Months--$699 After the June 25 Price Rise, a Record $10.4 Billion Mac Quarter, macOS 27, and a 12GB A19 Pro Model Reported for 2027

The MacBook Neo has been on sale for six months, and this is where it stands. It arrived on March 11 at $599 with an A18 Pro and 8GB of memory; Apple raised it to $699 on June 25, and MacRumors' September 4 report still had it there. By Apple's account it and the MacBook Pro drove a record June quarter for the Mac while Apple could not build enough of them; it runs macOS 27, and a successor is already reported for 2027. That is the shape of an Apple consumer portable: the first iBooks of September 1999 reached the readers who had ordered them and were in short supply by October.

What $599 bought in March, and what $699 has bought since June 25

Apple's press release of March 4 lists the machine: an A18 Pro with a 6-core CPU, a 5-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, 8GB of unified memory, a 256GB SSD, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display at 2408-by-1506 and 500 nits, up to 16 hours of battery life, two USB-C ports (one USB 3, one USB 2), in a fanless aluminum case of 2.7 pounds in four colors. The release calls it "Apple's most affordable laptop ever," at $599, or $499 for education, from Wednesday, March 11. John Ternus, then senior vice president of Hardware Engineering and the subject of our commentary on his move to the CEO's chair, called it "a laptop only Apple could create."

The chip is the iPhone 16 Pro's. Six Colors' review put single-core performance "somewhere between an M3 and an M4" and multi-core and GPU "more like an M1," and noted that the 8GB is built into the chip. The iBook, in our July 1999 keynote report, was a 300 MHz G3 with 32MB for $1,599.

On June 25 Apple raised prices on many products, and the Neo went to $699 for 256GB and $799 for the 512GB model with Touch ID, according to MacRumors; education pricing rose the same $100, to $599 and $699. Apple's explanation was the memory market: "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly."

Apple could not build enough, and the Mac had its best June quarter

By April 16 an order on Apple's online store would not arrive before May, and MacRumors reported Apple's plan had gone to 10 million units in 2026 from an original five to six million, with Tim Cook saying after the launch that Apple saw its "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers." The Neo uses binned A18 Pros, and MacRumors noted Apple could run out of them. On June 3 MacRumors relayed Ming-Chi Kuo's estimate that Apple had doubled its order from 5 million to 10 million, and Cook's word for the response on the April earnings call: "off the charts." We saw the pattern in the iBook's 140,000 advance orders of September 1999 and the screen shortage of October 1999.

Apple reported Mac revenue of $10.4 billion for the June quarter, up 29 percent and a June-quarter record, "despite significant supply constraints," driven by the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, per MacRumors' notes on the July 30 call; we covered the $109.4 billion quarter on September 9. On the call Apple said the Neo had been especially popular, its design and value resonating with customers around the world, that the Mac had its best quarter ever for customers new to the platform, and that about half of the Neos bought by U.S. education institutions replaced Windows and Chromebook devices. Apple told analysts it paid more for memory in the March quarter than in December and more in June than in March, and expects that "to continue to get worse in September." IDC's count, relayed by 9to5Mac on July 8, has Mac shipments up 10.1 percent in the June quarter, to a 9.9 percent share of a PC market that fell 4.9 percent.

It runs macOS 27, and a 12GB model is reported for 2027

The Neo is on Apple's list of Macs that run macOS 27 Golden Gate as "MacBook Neo (13-inch, A18 Pro)"; our September 15 report has what the upgrade changes. It has already had a release of its own: Apple's Tahoe update notes list macOS 26.3.2, bug fixes only, with the line "Requires MacBook Neo." What comes next is a report, not an announcement. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote on September 4 that Apple plans a second-generation Neo in 2027 with an A19 Pro, 12GB of memory and new colors, per MacRumors, which adds that the $100 education discount continues.

Six months in, our judgment: the consumer portable Apple cannot build fast enough is the one it priced right, and $100 has not changed that.