Apple's MacBook lineup now spans from $599 to well over $3,000, anchored by the new MacBook Neo running an A18 Pro chip, the same silicon inside the iPhone 16 Pro. The M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099 and ships with 512GB of storage standard, a $100 price increase over the M4 but with twice the base storage and SSD read/write speeds Apple claims are also twice as fast. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 7 are included. The 13-inch M5 Air is currently $50 off at Amazon and B&H Photo, dropping to $1,049.
The MacBook Neo is the genuinely new story here. It is capped at 8GB of RAM and maxes out at 512GB of storage, but at $599 it is the cheapest MacBook Apple has ever sold. No keyboard backlighting, thicker bezels, repositioned ports. Amazon has trimmed $5 off the 256GB model and $10 off the 512GB. Those are not deals. Apple's own refurbished store remains the more reliable savings lever, offering up to 20 percent off with a one-year warranty, and it is the only place to find certain discontinued configurations.
The article is worth reading in full for its breakdown of which MacBook chip tier actually justifies its price for specific workloads, including multi-display setups requiring 6K output, and for tracking discount patterns on MacBook Pro models that have reportedly been discounted by up to $800. If you are deciding between the Neo and the base Air, the benchmark comparisons in the linked Neo review are the deciding data.
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