<\/p>\n
In lieu of a polished livestream of a heavily produced, pre-recorded announcement of new stuff, Apple spread out a series of announcements across three days of press releases that culminated in small, invite-only events in a few different cities this week. The biggest news from all of that: The company rolled out its first new Mac laptop product line for the first time since 2015\u2019s plain MacBook. The MacBook Neo is a $599 laptop that comes in multiple vibrant colors and is powered by the chipset of the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. It\u2019s also one of the cheapest machines the company has ever released and it\u2019s landed with impeccable timing, given the supply chain that feeds all of our tech is being gobbled up to feed the great AI beast.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll get into the Neo, but that\u2019s not everything Apple announced this week. We also saw new MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, the iPhone 17e, an M4-equipped iPad Air, and two new displays from the Cupertino Crusher. (I\u2019m sorry, that\u2019s a terrible nickname.) You won\u2019t find a powerful new gaming laptop here, nor will the MacBook Neo make our list of budget gaming laptops, although that\u2019s not necessarily for lack of oomph. The new MacBook Pros will be plenty powerful; it\u2019s just that the industry, broadly, still doesn\u2019t make games for Macs.<\/p>\n
The MacBook Neo.<\/p>\n
The new MacBook Neo is Apple\u2019s cheapest brand-new laptop, ever, thanks to certain strategic omissions and the inclusion of the A18 Pro chip that Apple put in its iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max phones. With a starting price of $599, it\u2019s still on the high end of budget laptops, but it\u2019s also only a bit more than half the price of the company\u2019s next-cheapest laptop, the MacBook Air. Not only that, but it comes in four colors \u2013 Silver, Indigo (blue), Citrus (a yellowish green), and Blush (pink). <\/p>\n
Specs-wise, it\u2019s definitely a lower-end device than the MacBook Air, but should be more than sufficient for most casual use and even some professional applications. It has a 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine, Apple\u2019s name for its neural processor. It\u2019s got 8GB of RAM, which is piddly for a laptop these days but seems enough to run the company\u2019s AI \u201cApple Intelligence\u201d features, which the company says will work on it. <\/p>\n
The iPhone 17e<\/p>\n
The iPhone 17e is Apple\u2019s next budget iPhone, and it\u2019s got the right improvements versus last year\u2019s iPhone 16e, mainly in the power department. Where last year the $599 phone lacked MagSafe and was limited to 7.5W wireless charging, this year\u2019s model will get 15W charging with MagSafe. Apple also added a new color to the lineup: Pink joins the black and white color options that were offered before. <\/p>\n
The 17e also gets a bump to the A19 and the inclusion of Apple\u2019s C1X modem that Apple says will be double the speed of the C1 found in the iPhone 16e. Otherwise, it\u2019s more of the same. That means a 48MP single rear camera with 2x \u201coptical-quality\u201d digital zoom, a 12MP front camera, and a 6.1-inch 60Hz display with a notch instead of the Dynamic Island pill-shaped cutout from the rest of the iPhone 17 line. Still, the improvements are notable given that the previous model didn\u2019t quite make our list of favorite smartphones. <\/p>\n
The M4 iPad Air.<\/p>\n
The newest iPad Air gets an M4 chip, a bump from the M3 that was in the previous-generation model. In addition to the chip bump, the new iPad will also be the tablet proving ground for the company\u2019s N1 chip, a custom wireless chip that brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and a Thread radio to the device. The cellular iPad Air will use Apple\u2019s C1X 5G modem, to boot. <\/p>\n
Spec bump though it may be, this will be a powerful tablet, with an 8-core CPU, 9-core GPU, and 16-core NPU. Apple says it\u2019s \u201cup to 30 percent faster\u201d than the M3 iPad Air, which is already one of the best tablets around. It gets 12GB of RAM, up from 8GB, comes in 11-inch and 13-inch models, and keeps its usual starting price of $599.<\/p>\n
The M5 MacBook Air.<\/p>\n
Apple also updated its MacBook Air line with a new entrant, now equipped with an M5 chip. Mostly a spec bump available in the same four colors, the laptop still got a couple significant changes. For starters, the base storage is now 512GB, and it\u2019s got Apple\u2019s custom N1 chip, which means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. <\/p>\n
Apple didn\u2019t raise the price of the Air, which makes it a better deal than past models as components costs for RAM and storage have seen stark increases lately, owed to the voracious appetite of AI firms. That means the new MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch.<\/p>\n
The M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pro.<\/p>\n
The M5 chip made its first laptop debut in the base model MacBook Pro last year, but the higher-end versions of the chip, the M5 Pro and M5 Max, have only just emerged this week, in the form of new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops. The laptops get similar CPU and GPU core counts as before, but now Apple is touting \u201csuper\u201d cores that are even more powerful \u2013 so much so that the company has gotten rid of efficiency cores on these new Pro models, replacing them with performance cores, instead.<\/p>\n
Unlike the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pros got a price bump. They\u2019ll start at $1,699 for the base M5 MacBook Pro (a $100 jump), $2,199 for the M5 Pro MacBook Pro (up by $200), and $3,599 for the M5 Max MacBook Pro ($400 more than before). With that, though, they get a storage bump, as Apple has dropped the 512GB tier and now starts MacBook Pros with at least 1TB SSDs. The new laptops also get Apple\u2019s N1 chip.<\/p>\n
The Studio Display and Studio Display XDR<\/p>\n
Apple announced two new, very expensive 27-inch displays. The 5K Studio Display is the $1,599 follow-up to the company\u2019s 2022 model, albeit with apparently only minor changes: It now has two Thunderbolt 5 ports (one upstream, one downstream for daisy-chaining displays or adding accessories like Thunderbolt docks), and it now supports the Desk View part of Apple\u2019s Center Stage webcam feature. That means now the camera doesn\u2019t just follow you, it\u2019s wide enough to switch it to show what your hands are doing, too. <\/p>\n
The Studio Display XDR is where the real action is, thanks to the addition of a high-contrast mini-LED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and up to 1,000 nits SDR brightness or 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness. Features are otherwise nearly identical, except that it gets Apple\u2019s tilt-and-height-adjustible stand by default rather than the simple tilt-only one of the normal Studio Display. Oh, and it costs $3,299 to start ($3,599 if you want the anti-reflective Nano-texture glass). That price would make it hard for this display to beat dedicated gaming monitors, the best of which can cost thousands less.<\/p>\n
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In lieu of a polished livestream of a heavily produced, pre-recorded announcement of new stuff, Apple spread out a series of announcements across three days of press releases that culminated in small, invite-only events in a few different cities this week. The biggest news from all of that: The company rolled out its first new<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[5228,1556,4164,5227,2548,5226,4212,483],"class_list":{"0":"post-5294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news","8":"tag-17e","9":"tag-air","10":"tag-budget","11":"tag-iphone","12":"tag-laptop","13":"tag-macbook","14":"tag-nextgen","15":"tag-pro"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}