Name: I tested every new Apple Product!
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T21:47:43.000Z
Duration: 14 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Apple has just announced new 2026 MacBooks, iPads, displays, and

even a new iPhone, and they're kind of weird.

There's an unusual amount of focus on the affordable end, while at the same time making the extreme stuff much more extreme.

So let's find out why at the very bottom end then.

This is the new $599 MacBook Neo, which sits as the new entry point into Apple's laptop lineup.

A lot more affordable than the $1,099 MacBook Air, which in itself is a lot more affordable than the new top of the line $2199 MacBook Pros.

But the obvious question is how is Apple suddenly randomly selling a MacBook that costs half the price?

Well, it's not the build quality like I was expecting it to be.

This thing is still made of aluminum like the other MacBooks, and it still feels fancy to use.

The hinge is sturdy, the keyboard is satisfying to type on.

Even the trackpad still has all of the multi touch gestures that I'm used to from the MacBook Pros.

Frankly, I've never used a $599 laptop that feels this good.

I wish more companies would make colors like these.

I love them in especially this citrus which makes me feel like I'm 6 years old again marveling at my dad's iMac G3.

What's here is sharp, it's punchy, it could do with being a little brighter, topping out at 500 nits, but

that is still just as bright as the almost twice the price MacBook Air.

There's a couple of smaller things that are cut like Touch ID.

You don't get it on the base 256GB version of the Neo, but

you do get it on the higher storage version.

The Battery they claim 16 hours on this compared to 80 on a MacBook Air.

And the ports, there's no magsafe here and weirdly only one of these two USB C ports is fast enough to connect up to a monitor.

The other is slower, but you can use either of them to charge the thing.

Really though, there are two compromises that I think truly matter.

The first is that the keyboard on the Neo has no backlighting, which I think you will notice even if you don't tend to work in a cave pretty much any time that you try and get something done in a dimly lit car or late at night.

Backlighting is pretty a given feature at this price on other laptops I can imagine Quite a few people being surprised when their NEO arrives at their door without it.

And then the second thing is performance.

There is no laptop grade M series chip here.

This is actually using a phone chip, the A18 Pro, plucked straight from an iPhone 16 Pro, which might on its own have been able to fly under the radar.

But it's the fact that that is paired with slower SSD storage speeds than the Air and half the RAM 8 gigabyte here compared to 16 all put together, this is a distinctly less agile machine.

Some things do take a second or two to load up and you can see how this thing would get overwhelmed if you pushed it.

But if you're buying a MacBook Neo for gaming, I think you've got bigger problems.

So clearly the performance cutbacks are the main way that Apple has made this laptop so affordable.

But it's just they've done it in such a considerable way that if you're anything even resembling a multitasker, you would feel the benefits of the pricier MacBook Air exactly as Apple intended.

That said, I do think this laptop makes a ton of sense.

Like the MacBook Air has crept up in power every year since the first M1 version.

And that now means we are at a stage where there is a vast difference between what you can do on that laptop and the Google Docs and YouTube that the average school kid or university student actually needs to do on it.

So the Neo exists to cut back on that performance, to minimize that gap, passing on a lot of those savings to the buyer, especially if you use the education discount and end up getting it for $499.

And you can see the ripple effect that this has on every Apple laptop because there is now a very clear entry level option.

Apple doesn't need to worry anymore about hitting that sub $1,000 price tag with the MacBook Air.

So while this used to start at $999, the new MacBook Air is now 10 $99.

And I could see that climbing over the next few years quite substantially.

That said, it's still really hard to argue with the amount of laptop that you get for that.

This new MacBook Air has an M5 chip instead of the M4, which in itself is nothing major.

There's Apple's new N1 networking chip, which improves WI Fi and Bluetooth.

This has actually made a big difference on the latest iPhones, so will probably have the same effect here and then the main thing is that this new MacBook Air gets double the starting storage, now at 512 gigs, and

that double storage is now twice the as fast too.

So while I don't love this whole trying to disguise what is effectively a price hike by just removing the option to buy the lower storage version, this is still the most recommendable laptop in the world.

While the Compromises of the MacBook Neo are pretty obvious and the price of the new pros is pretty prohibitive, the MacBook Air is not really missing anything for most people, unless you're like the lead editor for the next Avatar movie.

And to be honest, they don't need more effects, they just need a better title font.

He clicked the drop down menu and then he just randomly selected Papyrus.

Speaking of the MacBook Pros at the very top of Apple's lineup, these have just had what's essentially just a more extreme version of the Air treatment.

So the same M1 networking chip and the same thing's happening with storage too.

It's twice as fast and you get twice as much of it, going from the minimum of 512 gigs last year to a terabyte now.

That said, one terabyte minimum on a Pro does not actually upset me because of how the MacBook Air has naturally drifted over the years from this ultra thin, ultra light laptop that can just about function to now actually very powerful machine in 2026.

You're only buying a MacBook Pro if you actually are a pro, and

if you are a pro, you're going to need a terabyte at least.

And then the chip upgrade for these laptops is supposedly pretty serious.

They're now powered by the M5 Pro, which it depends what you're doing, but

you could broadly think of this as around two times the system power and capability of the base M5 and then the M5 Max, which has the same CPU as the Pro, but

then up to two times the graphics performance of even that.

So on paper it is a monolithic chip with up to four times the AI performance compared to previous gen.

That's probably not going to translate to a whole lot for most users, but

It's a big deal for people who want to be running large AI models locally for so these are huge improvement numbers, but

If you watch the commercials for these new MacBook Pros, it literally says in plain text up to five times faster graphics.

Five times compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max just last year.

That's what you'd assume it means, right?

Oh, so like five times compared to three years ago.

So what people are likely upgrading from?

Well, if you're performing this one specific AI image generation task, then maybe.

Ultimately it's only when you delve all the way into the depths of the Apple press release that you find the graphics performance for M5 max is up to 20% higher than M4 max.

So the number you're actually looking for is up to 20%.

I guess I just want to make it clear that while I do think the MacBook Pro is an exceptional machine, I'm actually really excited to finally upgrade my whole team's M1 and M2 so we can get our videos out even faster.

I so much more appreciate it when companies just talk straight and they aren't trying to fool people with numerical smoke and mirrors.

That combined with the fact that every single improvement here is quoted as an up to figure, as opposed to any kind of absolute improvement, which if you think about it, doesn't tell us anything about how much you should actually expect to notice day to day, up to 500% faster.

All topped off with the fact that if you live in the EU, you don't actually get a power brick with these MacBooks, you have to buy it separately.

Now what exactly this decision making process is based on is not clear.

But if you're buying a 16 inch MacBook Pro, which would usually come with a 140 watt power rig, then I don't think that is something that you're likely to just have lying around and is a fair bit of value that you're now missing out on.

If the laptop was cheaper to accommodate, then I guess I get it.

And now just before the new iPhone, there's also a new iPad Air.

So this is Apple's mid range iPad sitting about halfway between the iPad, you know, the one that's just called iPad.

And then the iPad Pro, and it's not a bad update, it's just unexciting.

It gets an M4 chip instead of an M3 chip, 12 gigabytes of RAM up from 8, and