The newly announced Apple MacBook Neo is full of surprises. First, the $599 price tag is delightfully affordable in today’s economy. Secondly, it’s built on the last-generation flagship smartphone chip — the Apple A18 Pro — paired with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. In that sense, it looks like smartphone hardware unleashed to run at full tilt in a laptop form factor. Apple claims it’s faster than an unspecified Intel Core Ultra 5 laptop, which certainly sounds impressive.
In some ways, the MacBook Neo is the sort of laptop Google would love to have built. It’s affordable, lightweight, and designed to blast through browsing and office tasks. The very same users Google has been catering to with Chromebooks for what seems like eons. Google is even in early planning to unify mobile and desktop landscapes with Aluminium OS (a version of Android), hinting at a future where the same hardware in your phone also powers your Android PC. That’s basically the Neo.
