Apple appears to have prematurely revealed the name of its rumored lower-cost MacBook model, which is expected to be announced this Wednesday. A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.
I mean, if that fits your use-case, I’m not gonna tell you not to get it. Plenty of folks just need a machine for scrolling a social media feed, documents, and Youtube.
But anyone who wants more than what amounts to a Chromebook can get it pretty affordably with the low-end macbooks. Effectively tripling your speed for another $200 is definitely worth it for lots of folks, and memory paging is a lot faster than it used to be.
Benchmarks can be hit or miss, but aren’t totally useless:
N150: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+N150
Low-end M1 from 2020: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+3200+MHz
And finally, the A19 they’re talking about using: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A19+Pro
These are CPU benchmarks, they don’t account for available RAM.