Apple launches the must anticipated and fairly leaked MacBook Neo. A new MacBook which seems to aim to fill the gap between Apple’s iPad experience and entry-level MacBook. But after a routine update bricked my relatively young, but objectively expensive, M3 MacBook Pro. But a recent update has made me completely reconsider anything I have to do with Apple’s ecosystem.
Apple MacBook Neo: A Smart Entry Point, With Caveats
Apple’s latest budget offering lands at around €699, making it the most affordable way into a new Mac ecosystem right now. At that price, it’s hard not to pay attention, but it’s also worth being honest about what you’re actually getting.
What It Does Well
For everyday use, the MacBook Neo will likely punch above its price. The A18 Pro chip should handle web browsing, Office apps, and light creative work without breaking a sweat, and Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji generation will be noticeably snappier than on older M2-based machines. If you’re a student or casual user juggling a typical workload, it will genuinely feel premium in a way that similarly priced Windows laptops struggle to match. Build quality, portability, and battery life for light use are, on paper, all solid.
Where It Shows Its Limits
The 8GB of RAM is where things will get honest. Push it with 20-plus Chrome tabs or a heavier multitasking session and you’ll likely notice the difference compared to an M2 Air. Under heavier workloads, the M3 Air will also edge it out; Photoshop exports, for instance, finish roughly 15% faster on that machine. The Neo is not trying to be an all-rounder.
Who Should Actually Buy It
If your needs are light, this is a genuinely compelling purchase. Students, casual browsers, and anyone upgrading from an ageing Windows budget laptop will find it a meaningful step up.
If you’re doing CAD work, video editing, or serious multitasking, it’s worth stretching your budget. A discounted M2 Air around €800 gives you more RAM headroom and better GPU muscle. The M3 Air at €1,099 is the safer long-term investment if future-proofing matters to you.
The Bigger Picture
Apple is clearly targeting the budget end of the market here, and they’ve done it without cutting corners on the things that matter most to everyday users. It won’t satisfy power users, but it was never meant to. For the right person, it’s a smart, well-built machine at a price that’s difficult to argue with.
But argue with it I will, because this week my own M3 MacBook Pro bricked itself during a routine update leaving me wondering why I bother with Mac at all. I’ve already moved away from iPhone, leaving the stickiness of the Apple ecosystem completely shattered.
Apple Just Works: Until it Doesn’t
There’s a phrase that Apple fans reach for whenever someone questions the premium. “It just works.” And in fairness, most of the time, it’s true. The integration is real, the polish is genuine, and day-to-day use is often frictionless in ways that other platforms still struggle to match. But then something breaks, and you get a very different view of what you’ve actually paid for.
Take a bricked Mac during a software update. Not exactly a rare failure mode, and not one caused by user error. The update Apple pushed, on Apple hardware, leaves your machine completely unresponsive. Fine. These things happen. The question is: what’s the recovery process?
If you’re on Windows and something goes catastrophically wrong, there are multiple paths back. Boot from a USB stick. Use recovery media. Reinstall from another machine entirely. Apple does offer a recovery mode, but here’s the catch: to revive a modern Mac, you need another Mac running the right software. Not an iPhone. Not an iPad. Certainly not a Windows PC. A Mac. A recent enough Mac, at that. An older Intel model? No good. The software won’t run.
So the safety net for your Mac is another Mac. That’s the ecosystem working as designed.
If you don’t have a suitable device to hand, you’re heading to Apple or an authorised service provider. Which is where things get genuinely frustrating. The repair centre, stocked with Macs presumably capable of running the recovery tool, cannot simply plug in your machine and push a button. They have to send it away. Ten to twelve business days. And there’s a reasonable chance that a Mac bricked by Apple’s own update will not be covered under warranty, meaning you’re looking at a service fee to fix a problem you didn’t cause.
The warranty angle has its own wrinkle, too. If you bought your Mac outside your home region, you may find yourself on a shorter warranty than you’d expect, even within a market that legally requires longer coverage. The terms vary depending on where the device was purchased, not where you live.
What makes all of this particularly galling is that this specific failure, a Mac unresponsive after a software update, is fixable. Apple knows how to fix it. The tool exists. Under the hood, it’s not a hardware problem. It could be resolved in minutes with the right cable, the right software, and a keyboard shortcut. Apple has simply built a recovery process that routes you through their service channel rather than letting you resolve it yourself.
That’s a choice. A deliberate one.
None of this means Macs are bad computers. They’re not. The hardware is excellent, the software integration is genuinely impressive, and for most people most of the time, the experience lives up to the reputation. But “it just works” was always a marketing line, not a guarantee. And when it stops working, you find out fairly quickly how much of the ecosystem you actually own versus how much you’ve simply been granted access to.
Worth keeping in mind, next time someone gives you the look for not running macOS. I’ve already moved back from iPhone to Android. I enjoy better cameras, battery, overall features and have more workarounds than ever for quick file transfers.
