Apple had a busy week: new displays, a new iPad, 3 new MacBooks, and a new iPhone. The individual products range from incremental to genuinely interesting, but the more you look at the whole picture, the headline to me is that Apple has figured out how to lower the entry point to their ecosystem without making anything that appears to be junk. That’s harder than it sounds.
The Neo and the 17e
This week’s headliner, the MacBook Neo starts at $599. It has an A18 Pro chip, 8GB of memory, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, solid battery life, and the build quality folks have come to expect from Airs and Pros. Getting to that price point obviously requires some creativity on Apple’s part. What it doesn’t have: MagSafe, Thunderbolt ports, a haptic trackpad, or a backlit keyboard. The $699 model adds Touch ID and 512GB of storage, and that’s the one worth getting for most folks.
For that money, you’re not getting a compromised Mac. Frills are stripped away, sure, but I think that Apple has threaded that needle pretty well here. Schools and families are going to buy a lot of these, and for good reason.
The iPhone 17e tells a similar story. It gets the A19 chip from the standard iPhone 17, starts at 256GB (double what the 16e launched with) at the same $599 price, and finally adds MagSafe, which was a strange omission last year. The camera situation is still the main thing separating it from the “regular” or Pro line, but for most people that’s an acceptable trade. The Pro phones have become genuinely hard to recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a specific reason to want one. Personally, I have a 17 Pro and feel like it might be my last Pro phone.
Taken together, these two products represent something worth paying attention to. Previously, handing down an older device to a kid felt like the sensible move. Now there’s a real argument for buying them something new and selling your own device when you’re ready to upgrade. That shift reflects both how long people are holding onto their hardware and how good Apple’s entry-level products have gotten. It’s also an additional sales opportunity for our friends in Cupertino.
MacBook Air and Pro
The M5 MacBook Air is now $1,099, which stings a little, though the base storage doubling to 512GB softens it. This seems like a trend we’re seeing more of this year with higher RAM prices, so I’m not surprised. I think we’ll see more companies push bigger entry level spec bumps with accompanying higher prices to keep their margins healthy. If you’re on an M2 or earlier, the jump in numbers is legitimately impressive. The Air remains the default answer when someone asks what laptop to buy.
The MacBook Pro line got M5 chips with meaningful gains, particularly around AI workloads. If you need a Pro, you’ll know. If you’re asking whether you need one, see above. Get the Air.
iPad Air
The M4 iPad Air is mostly an under-the-hood story: faster chip, 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB), 120GB/s memory bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7 via Apple’s N1 chip. It’s a good iPad made better. Cool.
The Displays
Apple updated the Studio Display and introduced the new Studio Display XDR. The standard display gets a 12MP camera, which is a welcome improvement. The XDR is genuinely impressive on paper: 5K with mini-LED, 2000 nits peak HDR brightness, 120hz with Adaptive Sync, and Thunderbolt 5. It’s a legitimately great display for people doing serious color work.
Apple’s monitors have always been the one area of the lineup where even fans do a double-take at the price. That hasn’t changed. I bought my Studio Display when it came out mainly because I was building out a home office and I’d think a lot harder about it today given the alternatives. But they’re still here, still beautiful, still priced accordingly.
The Bigger Picture
The “Apple tax” isn’t gone. The XDR display exists, after all. But the ground floor has moved considerably, and Apple has managed to do it without reaching for cheap materials or cutting corners on what actually matters to everyday use. The Neo appears to have great build quality and keep the things that make a Mac a Mac. The 17e is a real iPhone. While not announced today, even the Watch
Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t taken their foot off the gas for pro users. The MacBook Pro, the XDR display, the continued push into pro app subscriptions – there’s no sense that they’re trading one end of the market for the other. They’re doing both, which is the interesting part. It’s too early to say if they can walk and chew gum here, but lately their limitations have been on the software side, not the hardware one.
On the education side, the Neo is an obvious Chromebook challenger at $599 ($499 with education pricing). Apple has a decent story to tell there: real software, real Mac apps, Apple Intelligence built in, free OS updates, solid build quality. The MDM management story is still more complex than Chromebook’s cloud-first simplicity, though it also opens doors that ChromeOS can’t – including more fine-grained device control for admins (the kind of thing a scrappy company like Kolide by 1Password does well). There are also a lot of professional and creative apps that simply don’t exist on ChromeOS, and an Android port rarely, if ever, fills the gap. If Apple gets serious about the cloud-first management story for schools, they have a real shot at making inroads.
It was a good week to be in the business of selling computers. The hardware is ready. Guess we’ll see what they do with it this summer.