The cheapest new Mac costs £100 more than in June (but it’s still the one)
The MacBook Neo arrived in March at £599 and sold faster than Apple could make it. On 25 June, with no announcement, the price went to £699.
The reason was a memory chip shortage that Tim Cook told analysts was the sharpest component price rise the company had ever seen, and it hit the whole Mac range at once. Three months on, with the new iPhones launched last week and Christmas lists starting to form, the question for a dad who wants a laptop of his own has changed. It is no longer whether £599 was a bargain. It is whether £699 still is.
The short version is that the Neo remains the cheapest new Mac by a distance, roughly half the price of a MacBook Air, and the price rise changed what you pay without changing anything about what you get. What most dads want from it is not a workstation. It is the phone, with a proper screen and a keyboard: the banking app, the fantasy league, the bookmaker account for the Saturday football, the poker or casino app that comes out late on a Friday, the podcast queue. Knowing exactly what that is, and where it falls short, is what makes the difference between a good buy and a regret.
A phone chip inside a laptop is the whole reason the price works
Apple’s UK page for the MacBook Neo now lists it from £699 for the 256GB model, with the 512GB version, which adds Touch ID, at £800. Education pricing takes £100 off either. The saving against the rest of the range comes from the chip: instead of an M-series processor, the Neo runs on the A18 Pro that powered the iPhone 16 Pro. Apple built the first batches from chips it had paid for during iPhone production, which is how a full aluminium laptop with a 13-inch Liquid Retina screen and a battery that lasts a working day landed at a price normally reserved for plastic Windows machines.
Every Mac since 2020 has been able to run iPhone and iPad apps. The Neo is the first one running them on the exact chip they were written for, so the apps that live on a dad’s phone open on the laptop with no translation layer in between.
The App Store catalogue comes across whole, adult titles included
Sign into the App Store on a Neo with the account from your iPhone and those apps come with it, where developers allow it. There is no emulator to install and nothing to configure. Each one opens in a window with the login you use on the phone, on a screen big enough to see a whole league table and a keyboard you can type a message on without thumbs. The banking app is the first most people move across. The fantasy league is the second.
The Friday night apps come across with no extra steps, because the UK App Store does not keep them in a separate place. Bookmaker apps and licensed casino apps in the uk sit in the catalogue next to the banking app, age-gated to over-18s and run by operators the Gambling Commission has licensed, and on a Neo they open with the phone login on a 13-inch screen rather than a six-inch one. On a laptop that is a dad’s own machine, nothing about his phone’s app life gets left behind and nothing has to be run through a browser.
The trade-offs are known and none of them touch the apps
A £699 Mac gives some things up, and they are better known before the box is open. The keyboard has no backlight, which matters at midnight. The base model has no Touch ID, so unlocking and paying inside apps means typing a password, which is the strongest argument for the £800 version. Memory is 8GB and fixed, and only one of the two USB-C ports will drive an external screen. Which? made the case last month that a Windows laptop at the price gives you more storage and a bigger display, and for someone who lives in large spreadsheets that is fair.
None of it reaches the app side. Phone apps were built around phone-sized memory, so 8GB is generous for them, and anything that talks to a server over Wi-Fi never notices the port. Where a dad’s hardware money goes is a recurring subject on these pages, and the case for building a gaming PC on a budget sets out the opposite bet, more power for the pound at the cost of portability and simplicity. The Neo is the other end of that trade.
Buy now, buy refurbished or wait for the 2027 model
Three routes exist. Apple began selling refurbished Neos on 26 June, the day after the price rise, at around 15% under the new list price, which puts a 256GB machine back under the original £599 with a full Apple warranty. Macworld’s price tracking expects Black Friday deals to bottom out near £529, and no lower. And Bloomberg reported last week that a second-generation Neo with an A19 Pro chip and 12GB of memory is due in 2027, which will ease the memory limit but arrives after Christmas and at a price nobody has seen.
For a dad who needs the laptop this autumn, the refurbished route wins on every count: launch price, current hardware, Apple’s own guarantee. For one who can wait, the November sales are worth a diary note. Either way, the machine that made a new Mac fit a household budget in March still does in September, even at £100 more.
