Neo beginnings

I did it. I finally bought a new Mac. I managed to snatch a MacBook Neo on Amazon a few minutes after Apple announced the price increase across their line-up. It all happened very quickly, but I think it’s worth taking the time to explain my messy, complex, overcomplicated train of thought.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I complained (or bragged) a lot about the fact that I still used an early 2020 MacBook Air as recently as two weeks ago, and that its battery was getting a bit old, and it was maybe a little bit slow at times. I explained in a post that I felt confident in being able to keep using it for one more year, as its limitations felt more like a way to focus and maintain a well-controlled set-up rather than constraints. I was ready to wait for something like the M6 generation of the MacBook Air (so I could continue my story with that family of laptops, which started with the early-2015 11-inch model).

But this post was written in January, before Apple unveiled the new M5 MacBook Air, and, as a little surprise, the MacBook Neo.

I first considered the Neo, because its clear limitations were not a deal-breaker for me; on the contrary, they were a great follow-up to my then-current set-up, which was very much not demanding by design. In fact, the Neo looked pretty much, feature by feature, like the laptop of my dreams: simple, focused, reliable, cheap, well-built, straight to the point.

With the classic Apple pricing ladder, of course the MacBook Air looked very tempting, offering so much more for just a little extra: better speakers, better trackpad, a backlit keyboard, double the memory, a better screen, a better audio jack, better connectors, a better battery, a far better chip, a better webcam, Touch ID, etc. Therefore, for 400 euros more, it looked like a better deal, and better value than the Neo. I could even use that extra bit of power to finally edit photos on my laptop instead of on my phone, where the screen and performance have long been better suited than those of my old Mac for running apps like RAW Power.

This is where it got a bit complicated in my head and froze all my purchase intentions.

Value-wise, the MacBook Air M5 was, like I said, a much, much better choice than the Neo: for 50% more money, you get more than double the computer basically. Money-wise, if the Neo is indeed sold at a great price, it’s not as good a deal as the MacBook Air, not as good value. But if I were to stick to value and price, well, keeping my old MacBook Air Core i5, costing me zero, would always be a better deal.

For a while, whenever I thought of “what I already have” (the old MacBook Air) versus “what I really want” (the new MacBook Air), I had always chosen the easiest and cheapest option of the two. What I should have done instead was focus on the fundamentals: what I actually needed (the MacBook Neo).

What I need is a laptop I can count on, but not only performance-wise, where my old Air was surprisingly resilient. The battery life, enabling the laptop lifestyle, is essential. Spending time on my computer is my hobby, my pleasure at the end of the day. On the days I had forgotten to plug the computer in, when I wanted to check something sitting on the couch or on my balcony, far from the reach of the charging cable, well, I could not: the little bugger had no juice left, my end-of-the-day moment was ruined, and this situation was overall a pain.

So when I first learned that Apple planned to raise prices, I reconsidered once again the timeframe in which I had to change my Mac. Waiting another year and spending 20% more for the same-ish computer as the one I could buy today didn’t look like a good idea. So when I saw that Amazon had a special deal on the MacBook Air, priced at 1080 instead of 1200 euros, I was ready to buy one.

A few days later, while I still hadn’t made the jump on the purchase, I saw the headlines pop up that the Air was getting 200 euros more expensive on the Apple store. From that moment, I knew I had to act fast, before Amazon raised the price too.

This is when I saw that the Neo was sold at 630 euros instead of 700, and this is when a little light bulb appeared above my head. This Mac was the one I needed. In fact, as I needed to buy the laptop right away, before the price change, I was keen on saving 450 euros, especially a few days before my salary arrived. The 630 euro price tag was more affordable than 1080 and more compatible with an impulse buy.

So I ordered the cheapest Neo model, without Touch ID, and ended up saving 170 euros on the Neo. That’s more than a 20% discount if applied to the current price on the Apple website. Needless to say, I’m very pleased with this deal: now if I were to sell my computer I could possibly still get more money than I paid for it, in case I end up unsatisfied with it, which is not the case so far.

After two weeks of regular use, I have no complaints really. Thank you Apple for raising prices and forcing me to buy the computer I actually needed, I guess?

Performance is fine, even great when compared to my old Mac. I want to say it’s more or less as snappy as the M1 MacBook Air I use for work. Clearly, this is no match for the M5 chip, and 8GB of memory may feel a bit limiting, but I don’t need that much memory to run BBEdit, NetNewsWire, GoodLinks, and Safari anyway. I actually like that this limitation is forcing me to keep my feet on the ground when it comes to trying out new apps and revisiting my current set up. We’ll see how it goes in the coming months and years. I don’t think I’ll be able to push this device as hard as I pushed my old Air, but hey, it’s almost half the price.

The keyboard is more or less the same, if a bit firmer, probably due to the fact that it’s a new computer and I come from a six-year-old, worn-out keyboard.

Most of the computer feels identical to the Air, if ever-so-slightly worse, like the speakers or the screen. As I don’t plan to edit photos on this machine, really, there is only one part where I really “suffer” from a downgrade compared to the Air: the trackpad.

The Air’s trackpad has been so good for so long that we tend to forget about it: the haptic feedback makes it very satisfying and informative to click. On the Neo, pressing on the trackpad is nowhere near as satisfying. The travel distance of the trackpad is, I want to say, 60 to 70% longer than it feels like on the haptic trackpad, and this is 60 to 70% too long, too deep, too loud. So far, this is the only part that feels really worse in terms of my daily experience.

In the end, this is what the Neo really is: a familiar 630-euro laptop — a 630-euro new Mac — perfect for my activities of web browsing, video streaming, writing, and geeking around with apps. Dare I say that the Neo, as a single-purpose device, is a perfect blogging machine?