Apple's new MacBook Neo is its cheapest laptop yet at just $599, and it's a much more interesting proposition than these plasticky Windows laptops.
Rumors of Apple's entry into the affordable laptop market were accurate, they just took years to come true. March 4, 2026, saw Apple launch a laptop at the impossibly low price of just $599. Or $100 less, if you're buying as a student or teacher.
Apple is more accustomed to the other end of the market. The one where a $1,100 MacBook Air is considered a good value and a MacBook Pro is just the cost of doing business.
But the $599 laptop market, one that Apple hopes to crack, is a whole new ball game. It's where the majority of Windows and Chrome-powered laptops live, and it's full of options.
Those options are rarely good ones. That's something Apple hopes the MacBook Neo could be about to change. And judging by whats available, it stands a good chance of doing just that.
$600-worth of instantly forgettable plastic
While the MacBook Neo comes in a range of colors atop its premium metal chassis, the opposite can be said of the competition. Flicking through Amazon's collection of budget laptops reveals a sea of boring, nondescript laptops that would look right at home in the netbook boom of the late 2000s.
You know, the netbook that the MacBook Air and iPad eventually killed dead.
On a more positive note, they do tend to come with larger displays than Apple's. 15.6 inches seems to be the norm here.
One example is an HP machine dubbed the "Business Laptop." It boasts just 128GB of storage, though it does have 16GB of RAM to call its own. Amazon's product page claims it's Moonlight Blue, but it looks battleship gray to me.
HP offers any color you like, so long as that's gray
It's even less exciting on the inside, too, thanks to the use of an Intel N200 chip with a total of four cores. Integrated Intel graphics are responsible for pushing pixels around on-screen.
The Business Laptop normally sells for a little more than the MacBook Neo at around $650. It even comes with a hub included.
A little more interesting is the Dell DC15250, a 15.6-inch monitor with a very respectable 120Hz refresh rate. It also comes with more exciting specs, including a proper Intel Core i5 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a whopping 512GB of storage.
Gray or silver, who's to say?
But, like the HP before it, it looks like it's left over from a bygone time. A time when color was illegal, and everything had to be made from plastic. At $600, it's a closer competitor to the MacBook Neo so long as you never look at it. Or touch it.
Scrolling further reveals a HP Pavilion with 16GB of RAM, a 240GB SSD, and the unexciting Intel N100 chip. It's perfect conference room fodder, and at $599, it won't upset your finance department. But it's just so ... drab. You can get it in any color you want, so long as that happens to be Natural Silver."
And, the N100 is hardly what you'd call impressive. At best, it is half the speed of the A18 Pro.
If you want to get all funky, there's the Kaigerr 16.5-inch laptop that's theoretically designed for gaming. I've never heard of the company that makes it, but you do get an AMD Ryzen 7 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. And AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics should offer more gaming options than the built-in Intel stuff in the other machines.
This laptop looks more exciting than it really is
But, and stop me if you've heard this before, the Cosmic Gray color leaves a lot to be desired. And I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say this thing likely creaks and groans like an old shed waiting for one last gust of wind to put it out of its misery.
Mike, my editor, has seen one in the real world. He says that it creaks, groans, smells like a factory, and the fan screams like a banshee under any load at all.
And that's key here. You can get other laptops for $599. You can get laptops for less than $599. Some of them will even best the MacBook Neo on the spec sheet here or there, too.
But none of them can compete where it matters most at this price point. Laptops at this price range aren't world-beaters or performance monsters. So they should at least feel good in the hand, make you smile when you use them, and run the OS you want them to run.
And for that, you're going to want a yellow MacBook Neo. Or maybe the pink one, it's your call.
