The Best Laptop of the Decade? It Runs on a Phone Chip - MacBook Neo is Here
A phone chip just killed every Intel and AMD laptop
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If you’ve consumed a minute of tech news the last few weeks you have surely heard of that $599 MacBook that has all the tech world by storm.
And by now you might be somewhat bored by seeing the MacBook Neo over your Youtube, Instagram or Tiktok feed even.
Look, it’s common for Apple products to receive special spotlight at launch but the recently launched MacBook Neo deserves the high praise.
And it’s not just me saying it. Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips, being someone who is somewhat critical of Apple products at times, has said that he can only recommend MacBooks now.
If you had told anyone in the tech community that Linus would say that in 2018, they would have laughed at you.
Back then the arguments for buying Windows were genuinely stronger. MacBooks were expensive, ran hot, had bad keyboards, and the performance for the money just wasn’t there.
So what happened between then and now? And why is a $599 laptop the clearest and most surprising expression of it yet?
So, this isn’t another MacBook Neo article but it’s one that covers what was wrong with Apple before their own Silicon.
I’ll talk about what Apple did that no-one else could that led to we getting a $599 laptop from Apple.
And of course there will be a comparison of Neo to laptops at its price-point.
MacBooks Before Apple Silicon
In 2026, I feel if you have to talk about MacBooks you can divide all of them into two categories; Before Apple Silicon and After Apple Silicon because that’s what has provided the biggest edge to MacBooks.
Today’s MacBooks look perfect but it’s important to know that they weren’t like this forever.
To understand why the MacBooks of today are so good, let’s discuss some of the issues that plagued MacBooks before Apple Silicon arrived on the scene.
The Butterfly Keyboard
So, let’s start with the butterfly keyboard.
From 2015 to 2019, Apple shipped MacBooks with something called the butterfly keyboard. The name sounds beautiful but the product really was not.
The butterfly mechanism was an ultra-thin keyboard design Apple used across its entire MacBook lineup for four years running.
The pitch was that thinner keys meant a thinner laptop. The reality was that if a single crumb, a grain of dust, or a tiny piece of debris got under a key, the keyboard would stop working.
Keys would repeat on their own without being pressed. Letters would randomly stop registering. Some people had multiple keys fail simultaneously.
Apple’s solution was to replace the broken butterfly keyboard with another butterfly keyboard. The exact same design. And it would break again.
Reviewers questioned its reliability publicly. The keyboard became a running joke in tech circles. And then it stopped being funny when people started filing lawsuits.
Apple eventually paid $50 million to settle a class-action over it. But the keyboard was just the beginning.
The Dongle Era
The 2016 MacBook Pro redesign removed every port except USB-C. Not some ports. Every single port.
No USB-A. No HDMI. No SD card slot. Just USB-C holes and nothing else.
If you owned an external hard drive, a USB drive, a camera, or a monitor - all of which most people who spend $1,300 on a laptop tend to own - you now needed a dongle to use them.
The dongle era became its own meme. People sitting in coffee shops with a cluster of white adapters hanging off their MacBook like a bunch of grapes.
Apple is selling a $9 dongle for a machine that cost $1,299. Reviewers called it the most dongle-dependent laptop Apple had ever shipped.
The Heat Issues
And then there were the heat issues.
MacBook Pros from 2018 and 2019 showed severe throttling issues. The 2018 15-inch model launched with a software issue that slowed the processor below its rated speed under load, and Apple had to send out a formal apology.
Even though Apple sent patches the problem did not fully go away because the root cause was not the firmware, it was the build itself.
Apple also had to bear the brunt of Intel’s failure because back in 2015 Intel promised delivery of 10nm chips well before they actually arrived.
Apple had already designed the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure around those promised chips, and Intel was years late.
The heat piping, fan design, and laptop dimensions were all built around a processor that never showed up on schedule, leaving Apple cramming more powerful Intel processors into a body that was too thin to cool them properly.
What this meant in practice: the CPU would hit 100 degrees Celsius under load and throttle down to protect itself.
A $2,000 MacBook Pro with an Intel i9 processor - Apple’s most expensive consumer laptop - was slower under heavy workloads than the i7 model because the i9 generated more heat than the chassis could handle.
Dave Lee, a popular tech reviewer at the time, demonstrated this on YouTube and it went viral. A $2,300 laptop throttling itself below its advertised speeds was not a minor software bug. It was a fundamental design problem.
The 2017 MacBook Pro still carried the defective butterfly keyboard and had performance troubles from thermal throttling. CPUs slowed under heat, undermining the “Pro” status, and the faster Kaby Lake chips barely mattered in practice.
The Pricing Issues
And the price. Let’s talk about the price.
The base 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar started at $1,299 and came with a dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.
In 2017, you could buy a Windows laptop with a quad-core processor, 16GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU, a full set of ports, and a backlit keyboard for $700.
The MacBook cost nearly double, offered half the RAM, had a keyboard that might stop working if you ate a biscuit near it, ran hot, and required a separate $50 dongle.
High starting price relative to Windows alternatives with similar raw specs, accessories and dongles increasing total cost.
Many users found the premium unjustified given compromises in ports, keyboard reliability, and thermal limits.
The arguments for buying Windows during this period were not just valid. They were overwhelming.
Although not everything was bad with the MacBooks. There were things the Intel MacBooks did well.
For example, the display quality was excellent - Retina panels with P3 wide color gamut that Windows laptops at the same price could not match.
Build quality was still best in class. macOS was (and still is) a genuinely better operating system for a lot of people’s daily workflows.
The trackpad was the best in the industry by a wide margin. And for light work - browsing, writing, email, the machines were perfectly capable.
But for anyone spending $1,500 to $2,000 on a machine they expected to perform like a professional computer, the Intel era MacBook Pro was a consistently disappointing experience.
The gap between what it cost and what it delivered was hard to square. And Apple knew it.
The thermal issues in the MacBook line were likely one of the main reasons Apple moved strongly toward its own cool-running ARM processors.
Apple’s move to ARM has been great for the company. If you’re not up-to-date on what ARM means in this context, you may checkout my article linked here.
The decision to ditch Intel was not just about ambition. It was about fixing a problem Apple could not fix any other way.
The chassis was too thin for Intel’s chips of the time. And Intel kept missing its own deadlines for better, more efficient chips.
Apple had been waiting years for Intel to deliver something it could actually cool properly, and Intel kept disappointing them.
So Apple built its own.
How Apple Silicon Broke The Laptop Industry
In 2020, Apple announced it was done with Intel.
After fifteen years of using Intel chips in every single Mac, Apple decided it was going to build its own processor. Their first chip was called M1. And it landed like a bomb.
The MacBook Air with M1 launched at $999 with battery life that lasted well over twelve hours in real-world reviewer testing and not just in Apple’s controlled lab conditions.
The machine ran completely silently because it had no fan inside at all. It was faster than most Windows laptops that cost twice as much.
And the surface of the machine barely got warm even under load compared to every Intel MacBook that came before it.
People who had been dismissing Macs for years suddenly had very little to say.
Here is the key thing to understand about why M1 was so fundamentally different from what came before it.
Traditional laptop chips - your Intel and AMD processors are built from separate components that communicate with each other over something called a bus.
The CPU is one piece. The GPU is another piece. The RAM is separate from both.
When any of these components need to share data (which they do constantly) the data has to travel across that bus. That travel creates latency using energy while generating heat as a result.
Apple’s M1 put everything on a single piece of silicon. The CPU, the GPU, the memory, the neural engine for AI tasks - all of it sits on one chip and shares data through a unified RAM.
There is no bus for data to travel across between these components because they are all right next to each other.
The result is a system that does significantly more work with significantly less energy, generates much less heat, and on everyday tasks runs faster than Intel chips that consume two or three times as much power.
Reviews of the M1 MacBook Air showed that in terms of thermals under normal workloads, the machine remained comfortably cool while performing better than Intel-based Macs.
The passive cooling (no-fan design) turned out to barely matter for the tasks most people actually do on a laptop.
Browsing, watching videos, video calls. The M1 handled all of it without breaking a sweat and without making a single sound (because no fan, remember?).
Battery life on the Intel MacBook Air before M1 was around 6 to 8 hours depending on what you were doing.
The M1 Air took 12 to 15 hours. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a completely different category of machine.
And Apple didn’t stop there but kept going.
M2. M3. M4. M5. Each generation built on the architecture of the last. Each generation compounded the advantage over Windows.
Each year the gap between what a Mac could do and what a comparable Windows laptop could do grew a little wider.
MacBook Neo Enters The Chat
By 2026, the M5 has no real competition at its performance level. That is what five years of compounding advantage looks like.
