If Apple wanted to make a cheap laptop, then it should have made a cheap laptop – where’s the plastic MacBook Neo?
The new MacBook Neo is one of the best value Apple products in years – but I wish they'd gone even further
The new MacBook Neo is a genuinely impressive machine. Fast, thin, capable, and priced lower than any MacBook in recent memory at $599 / £599. Apple deserves credit for that. But reading the announcement, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling: Apple played it safe when they had a once-in-a-decade opportunity to do something truly exciting. Where, I ask, is the plastic MacBook?
Call it nostalgia if you like. I’ll own that. The polycarbonate MacBooks of 2006 – those chunky, cheerful slabs of white and black – were everywhere at school. They felt democratic in a way Apple products rarely do anymore. Everyone had one, or wanted one, at least. I came agonisingly close to buying the black model before talking myself into an aluminium MacBook Pro instead.
But this isn’t just about misty-eyed sentiment for a gadget I never actually owned. There’s a stronger argument here, and it’s got two prongs: price and personality.
Let’s talk price first. $599 is good. Under $500 is great. That’s a psychological barrier that matters enormously, especially to students, first-time buyers, and anyone who only needs a basic laptop for browsing the internet (and doesn’t want a tablet). A polycarbonate enclosure isn’t as premium as aluminium, everyone knows that, but it’s also significantly cheaper to manufacture. Pass some of that saving on, and you have a MacBook that starts at $499. That’s a MacBook for everyone.
And Apple, of all companies, knows how to make plastic feel good. The old iBook G3 had a build quality that made rivals look embarrassed, and so did the iPhone 3G. A modern Apple-engineered polycarbonate shell, with tight tolerances and a premium finish, wouldn’t feel cheap.
Now for the fun part. Imagine, for a moment, that Apple had looked not just at the MacBook Neo’s price point but at the cultural moment we’re living in. Nineties and early-2000s tech aesthetics are absolutely everywhere right now. Translucent gadgets, bold colours, that particular flavour of fun futurism – it’s all back with a vengeance.
A MacBook Neo in Bondi blue. In tangerine. In lime. In a deep, semi-translucent graphite that lets you just barely see the logic board beneath. Tell me you don’t want that. Tell me that laptop doesn’t go viral the moment the first review unit lands on a YouTuber’s desk. It would be the most photographed laptop since — well, since the coloured iMacs themselves. You don’t even have to imagine how they look, I asked Gemini to mock up a design for me:
There is one honest concession to make. The aluminium MacBook Neo is, by Apple’s own account, its lowest-carbon MacBook yet – packed with recycled content and manufactured using processes that dramatically cut material waste. A polycarbonate version would walk that back somewhat. That’s a real trade-off.
The MacBook Neo is a fine laptop. Great, even. But a plastic MacBook Neo? That could be an Apple product that people fall in love with.
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Spencer Hart
Buying Guide Editor 
