|
It's running on a mobile chip, but it's the screen and sound that may be MacBook Neo's best qualities.
|
|
See photos of Apple's new budget laptop that costs $500 less than the cheapest MacBook Air.
|
|
The iPhone 17e was announced on Monday through a press release, so there was no real chance to immediately get a hands-on with it. But at Apple's event in New York today, the phone was on display alongside the new MacBook Neo, iPad Air M4, MacBook Pro M5 and Studio Display XDR. I managed to take it for a quick spin to see if it is truly as similar to the iPhone 16e as it appeared from pictures. Spoiler: It mostly is.
One of the most noteworthy changes to the iPhone 17e is the addition of MagSafe support, and aside from confirming whether that works, I don't really have any impressions to add. I also can't tell you at the moment whether the increased wireless charging speed makes a difference, although mathematically I have to imagine it would.
I did get a chance to try out the new Portrait photography here. I brought my iPhone 16e and tried taking portraits with both devices. I could immediately see that the iPhone 17e allowed me to apply an artificial background blur to pictures I was framing up of the new MacBook Air M5, whereas my iPhone 16e just said "No person detected." In the Photos app, I was able to adjust the level of blur and adjust the focal point to bring a different group of flowers in focus, too.
The other thing I can tell from seeing the iPhone 17e in person is that this new pink color option is absolutely delightful. I won't go as far as to call it stunning or vibrant — it's too subtle to be either of those things. It's almost the same shade of pink as
|
|
Apple just announced the MacBook Neo, a 13-inch laptop offering the full macOS experience for just $599. It is the machine, I'm sure, plenty of the company's fans have been clamoring for since the dawn of the netbook. I'm equally sure its specs have enough drawbacks to ensure there are still plenty of customers for the more expensive Macbooks; the same cannot be said of the iPad Air.
If you're looking for a machine that you can actually use meaningfully, the Neo has the Air beat. It has two USB-C ports, 16-hour battery life, a real keyboard, trackpad and the ability to run macOS with proper multitasking. $599 won't even get you an iPad Air with a keyboard and trackpad, which costs you an extra $270.
Of course, the MacBook Neo is sandbagged in all of the ways Apple will always sandbag a cheaper product. But I do think the company has been smart enough to ensure the base model, which I'm sure will sell a crazy amount, is enough of a computer to matter. The A18 Pro chip will run a lot slower than Apple's M-Series silicon but raw performance isn't the big issue. After all, if you're buying this machine as Apple's version of a Chromebook, you're not going to be compressing 55GB Final Cut Pro files here. This is a machine for light work, the sort of stuff the iPad was always meant to enable, but has never quite been able to.
Apple knows how its A-series chip stack up against low-end laptop CPUs. Given the differences in OS, it's impossible to make a real comparis
|
|
