Following unprecedented price hikes on the Mac and iPad, Apple is now working on a leasing program to alleviate customers during the AI rush. According to a new Bloomberg report, the program is called "Apple Upgrade" and will allow you to lease a midrange or high-end device for up to 36 months, at the end of which you can choose to keep it. Apple is purportedly partnering with Klarna on the service.

Apple Upgrade will reportedly be a subscription service with monthly payments spanning across 24 months for iPhone and Apple Watch, or 36 months for Mac and iPad, including the Pro models. According to the report, Entry-level hardware like the MacBook Neo is not included in this program. Education or business discounts are also excluded; Apple is explicitly targeting regular consumers who've been affected by the ongoing component crisis.

According to Mark Gurman, customers will be subject to a soft credit check and only be approved for the program after passing it. The program will be available both in-person at physical Apple Store locations and online on Apple's website. At first, it will only be available in the United States, but we don't have any info on whether Apple Upgrade will expand beyond the region later.

As mentioned, Klarna is reported to be the official broker between Apple and the customer. The leasing structure would closely follow standard practice, where you can choose to keep the asset at the end after paying a residual fee, or return it, in which case you were just renting the hardware. Customers will also reportedly have the option to upgrade to a newer model if they finish their payments early.

For instance, if you leased an iPhone 17 Pro Max but Apple announced the 18 Pro Max a few months later, you could simply get the new device early if the old one was already paid off. Some of you will know that Apple already has an upgrade program for iPhone, but this one is different since it expands to Mac, iPad, and other accessories, and, more importantly, it doesn't come with AppleCare.

In fact, Bloomberg says Apple will eventually phase out the iPhone Upgrade program in favor of Apple Upgrade as a whole. New enrollments for standard financing through the Apple Card will also reportedly be discontinued. The company will advertise lower monthly payments to attract customers, which will ultimately allow it to keep a stable income during one of the most turbulent consumer tech eras the world has ever seen.

TSMC intends to raise base quotes on advanced chip production services by up to 10%, according to Nikkei, which cites people with knowledge of the matter. The price hike reflects increased demand for sophisticated processors by the AI sector, raising costs of tools and materials, as well as amplified investments in new production capacities.

For advanced process technologies — which TSMC considers 7nm-class and below — TSMC plans to raise baseline prices by 5% to 10%, depending on the particular production node and customer, the report claims. Furthermore, customers that need additional HPC chip capacity beyond their original volume requirements will reportedly have to pay another 10% to 15% premium on top of the standard increase, which means that some services will get a price hike of around 25%, if the report is accurate.

TSMC also intends to increase prices for mature manufacturing technologies, including its 12nm, 16nm, and 28nm-class nodes as well as other legacy fabrication technologies, the report claims. Increases could reach 10%, although certain nodes will reportedly see smaller adjustments, according to Nikkei.

Advanced technologies generated around 77% of the foundry's revenue in Q2 2026, whereas mature nodes accounted for 23%, which essentially means that TSMC is hiking prices on all of its services.

The company reportedly began discussing the new pricing with customers around June and completed negotiations in July. Rather than introducing higher rates immediately, TSMC opted to implement them from the beginning of 2027 to give clients like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and MediaTek additional time to accommodate the changes and adjust their prices accordingly.

Since TSMC produces the lion's share of advanced processors for AI, HPC, networking, and smartphone applications, its price hikes will inevitably create a ripple effect in the industry and will make almost all electronics more expensive.

TSMC is not alone in raising prices these days. Vanguard International Semiconductor has also raised prices, while UMC began implementing increases in July. Also, memory makers have increased prices significantly, making TSMC management jealous. Intel also recently increased prices of its client and data center CPUs, citing market demand.

"I am really jealous about memory companies' 86% gross margin," said C.C. Wei, chief executive of TSMC, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors. "86% [margin at memory makers] – 68% [margin at TSMC], I will be happy about that."

TSMC rarely comments on its prices to a large degree because they vary based on volumes and relationship with a particular client. Nonetheless, the head of the company stressed that the company has no intentions to increase prices suddenly or dramatically.

"So we do not suddenly increase our price by which I like to have 4x or 5x," Wei said. "You cannot survive for that kind of... for your customer to survive for that kind of price increase. So we earn our value, and we make sure that our profit, our gross margin, is enough for our long-term sustaining expansion, that is to the benefit of my customers and TSMC also, that is our philosophy."

There's no denying how good the build quality and construction of Apple's MacBook Pro lineup are. They are what every other high-end laptop manufacturer tries to emulate, which lets Apple charge a very high price for the privilege of owning one. If you're looking for a high-performance laptop for coding, video production, or even some light LLM/AI tasks, then this deal on the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with M5 chip for $2,699 is worth a look. B&H Photo has slashed $400 off the $3,099 list price to bring it down to this price, and give you the chance to pick up a powerful laptop with 48GB of memory.

● Check out this deal at B&H Photo

This 14-inch MacBook Pro uses the latest M5 Pro chip, with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering amazing processing power in a small package. This model sports a hefty 48GB of unified RAM, a 1TB SSD for storage, and a crisp 3024 x 1964-pixel Liquid Retina XDR display (1600 nits peak HDR brightness), with superb battery life (up to 24 hours).

Other features include a 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View support, an in-house N1 networking chip that combines Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, an SDXC Slot, Thunderbolt 5, and a MagSafe 3 connector.

We had the chance to review the MacBook Pro 14-Inch and found that the M5 chip delivers solid performance gains over its M4 predecessor. The SSD performance has greatly improved, and the rocking speaker system is still a cut above similar laptops from competitors. In our benchmark testing, the MacBook Pro's M5 CPU delivered between a 10 to 20% improvement over the prior generation's M4 chip in CPU performance.

If the price tag of $2,699 and 48GB of RAM are a little too high for your tastes, you can also pick up the same 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip, but with 24GB of RAM for $2,299, with the same hardware and features as our main deal.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Apple's planned M7 Ultra chip is being designed to support up to 1.5 TB of unified memory and to push AI performance toward the class of Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators, according to a new Bloomberg report published by Mark Gurman. But whether the lofty top memory config can ship at all will depend on the state of the memory market, and the part isn't expected until 2028. The same report says Apple has compressed its Mac silicon timeline, taping out the M7 roughly six months after the M6.

We've already heard that Apple plans to release a base M6 chip this fall for entry-level Macs, then skip the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions of that generation and move straight to the M7 line. However, Gurman now reckons that we'll see a base M7 in the first half of 2027, M7 Pro and M7 Max at the end of 2027, and the M7 Ultra in 2028. Apple reportedly began taping out the M7 about six months after it started the same process for the M6, which is what has enabled the company to pull the schedule forward.

The 1.5 TB target for the M7 Ultra is roughly twice the capacity Apple has planned for the M5 Ultra, per Gurman, who tied the configuration directly to memory availability. Apple already pulled the 128GB Mac Studio this year over supply constraints as DRAM prices climbed, and a 1.5 TB part would call for far more of the same scarce, high-cost memory.

Apple's current M3 Ultra already reaches 819 GB/s of memory bandwidth by fusing two Max dies, and it's the Ultra tier, not the base chips, that carries the heaviest local-AI workloads. Gurman describes the M7 Ultra as a large step up in AI performance rather than stated parity with Nvidia's data-center silicon. "I'm told the processor dramatically upgrades AI performance, bringing it closer to the class of dedicated AI accelerators such as Nvidia Corp.'s Blackwell," Gurman wrote in his report.

Apple is also preparing an AI server built on the M5 Ultra under the code name J246 for deployment soon, with a second server chip based on the M7 Ultra planned for 2029, according to the report. The 2028 generation, which includes an M8 chip code-named Soko and a high-end Mac part called Cardinal, moves to a 1.4nm process. That aligns with TSMC's A14 node, which the foundry has scheduled for mass production in the second half of 2028.

None of the dates or specifications have been confirmed by Apple.

Sotheby’s is preparing a blockbuster History of Science & Technology sale packed with amazing artifacts and collectors’ items. While there are many items that could justify being singled out, the famous auction house has chosen to spotlight a working sample of the Apple-1 computer serial number 01-0033 (1976) on its YouTube channel. Remember this first 50 hand-built-by-Wozniak batch has a place in history as the first commercial Apple computers ever sold.

In the video above you can see Harry Sadler, the original and current owner of the Apple-1 computer up for auction, preparing, booting and demonstrating this ancient ‘pre-built.’ Sadler underlines that his rare example was bought from the Byte Shop in 1976. While he ended up working in IT, Sadler said that it was mainly a hobbyist machine, for experimenting, tinkering with BASIC, and so on.

Interesting, Sadler took his Apple-1 back to the Byte Shop after a couple of weeks to get a minor repair done. There he met Steve Jobs and inquired about vacancies at Apple Computer. Nothing came of that because of admitted inexperience, but in 2010 Steve Jobs visited and bought the Siri Inc. startup, where Sadler was the 10^th employee. So, Sadler did actually end up working for Apple.

The estimate for this machine is $300,000 - $500,000. It comes with original accessories like a cassette deck and keyboard, vintage monitor. There’s also an original Apple-1 Operation Manual, In-house copy of Apple Basic Manual, Apple-1 Cassette Interface Manual, Microchess manual, and various software on cassettes

I think this is rather high, as one of the rare wooden case models known as the ‘Moore Apple-1’ only achieved $475,000 (w/BP) for its client last year.

Other notable computers in the sale

This Sotheby’s sale has quite a few other notable computers among the tech artifacts listed. For example, there’s the Steve Jobs stage-used NeXT Computer from the ‘NeXT Introduction’ in 1988, and a similar model for European demos. Then there’s a Mark-8 minicomputer from 1974, a MITS Altair 8800 computer from 1974, as well as some complete sealed vintage Mac systems from early on in Apple’s history.

On the more scientific side of things, there’s lots of interesting artifacts associated with, owned, or used by iconic individuals like Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Feynman, and even Albert Einstein.

The History of Science & Technology takes place on July 15, starting at 14:00 EDT live in Sotheby’s saleroom at 945 Madison Avenue in New York.

Apple filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, accusing the AI company and its chief hardware officer of stealing its trade secrets.

"OpenAI and its cohorts, led at least in part by former Apple employees, have recruited candidates from Apple, extracted their knowledge of Apple’s sensitive and confidential information, and then continued to exploit that knowledge once they arrived," the complaint reads. "As a result, OpenAI has misappropriated Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information in a variety of ways."

The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, names OpenAI technical staff member Chang Liu, chief hardware officer Tang Tan, OpenAI, and io Products as defendants. The last of that group is notable because it was founded by Tan in collaboration with former Apple design head Jony Ive, Evans Hankey (Ive's successor at Apple), and former Apple designer Scott Cannon. Notably, the complaint seems to attempt to avoid naming the founders, though Ive's name is cited in a URL.

Tan previously served as a vice president of product design at Apple, working on the iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch. Liu served at Apple as a senior electrical engineer.

In the complaint, Apple alleges that it reached out to OpenAI in February with concerns, but that OpenAI did not respond. Apple claims that Tan attempted to gain secrets from Apple employees, including asking prospective job candidates to bring components for "show and tell" sessions and used his knowledge of the company to squeeze more information out of candidates. The suit claims that Liu never returned a company laptop, and used an authentication bug to access Apple files.

Apple also claims that OpenAI told incoming employees how to leave their former job, suggesting they stay as long as possible and not disclose their former employer in order to continue to access confidential information.

"At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information," the suit reads. "As a natural result, OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Tom's Hardware. Apple's lawsuit claims that over 400 former Apple employees currently work at OpenAI.

Apple is rumored to be working on a number of AI-powered hardware projects, including AirPods with cameras, a pendant, and home robots. It's less clear what hardware OpenAI may be working on, though The Information suggested the company has a HomePod-style smart speaker in the works.

Apple is requesting a jury trial, damages, attorney fees, and orders that the OpenAI may not use Apple's trade secrets, among other injunctions.

In May, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was considering legal action against Apple because it expected deeper integration and more users from ChatGPT features built into iOS.

If the trial does go to court, it's sure to be a dramatic one, potentially dragging several former high-level Apple employees into testimony through discovery and testimony.The trial, Apple Inc. v. Liu et al, is case 5:26-cv-07078 in the United States District Court in Southern California.

As the ongoing component crisis worsens, even the biggest companies are no longer shielded. Apple, in a historic first, raised prices on a fleet of its products yesterday, saying it could no longer protect its customers from the soaring memory and storage costs. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that Apple is trying to lobby the U.S. government to secure official clearance to buy (cheaper) memory from China's CXMT.

CXMT is not outright banned by the White House, as it's not on the Defense Department's "Entity List," which prohibits Chinese companies entirely on national security grounds. Instead, it's listed in the 1260H list, which still designates it as a Chinese military company, and doing business with it would cause major reputational damage to an American company.

Apple has apparently been reaching out to its allies in Washington to persuade the government to allow it to purchase RAM from CXMT. Unlike Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix — the coalition controlling 90% of the world's DRAM — CXMT has no real incentive to chase AI buildouts. It can therefore provide RAM at much more reasonable prices without compromising performance.

Recently, Corsair Vengeance DDR5 sticks from China were found to use CXMT modules underneath, signaling the company's entry into the mainstream. That was a 6,000 MT/s CL30 kit, so it seems CXMT certainly has the ability to produce modern silicon at a scale sufficient for a major PC vendor like Corsair. OEMs such as Dell and HP are also adopting Chinese-made RAM for those region-bound systems.

Before that, CXMT has already demonstrated its capabilities for cutting-edge DRAM manufacturing; late last year, it showed off production-ready DDR5-8000 and LPDDR5X-10667 modules. Volume is another issue entirely, but Beijing has certainly figured out how to make performant RAM. If a buyer like Apple were to enter the picture now, even just for the Chinese market, it would completely shift the paradigm.

Of course, such a precedent is subject to approval, and high-ranking officials seem adamant against it. John Moolenaar, the chairman of the House China committee, has warned that Apple partnering "with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake." He told Financial Times that it's imperative for America not to rely on foreign supply chains for something as critical as DRAM.

Apple is in a dire situation itself, having lost $265 billion off its market cap the day it announced price hikes on MacBooks and iPads. In an uncharacteristic move, Tim Cook even admitted he'd never seen anything like this in his 40+ year stint. The Cupertino giant has always enjoyed comfortable margins on memory and storage upgrades, but it can no longer dam the "hundred-year flood."

"Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our security and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points of margin," remarked an ex-official. Another security expert said it wouldn't make sense for the administration to fiercely protect critical earths and rare minerals, while suddenly conceding in the AI race (which is the reason behind the RAMpocalypse).

Whether Apple's efforts in Washington succeed or not is also predicated on the changing of the guard, since Tim Cook will hand over the baton to John Ternus come September — a logistics wizard leaving at perhaps the most decisive moment he was needed. The AI boom is here to stay, and so is the component crisis for now, so it remains to be seen how the company navigates the oncoming challenges.

Apple will release a base M6 chip for entry-level Macs this year but skip the Pro and Max versions of that generation, jumping instead to an accelerated M7 family built around on-device AI, according to a report from Bloomberg. It’s the first time since the M1 that a generation would arrive without higher-end variants, and it pulls the M7 forward by as much as six months, with Pro and Max parts now due in late 2027 and an Ultra in 2028.

The M6, codenamed Komodo, is set for entry-level machines, including a refreshed 14-inch MacBook Pro, which has seen unprecedented price rises to $1,999. According to the report, which quotes individuals who asked not to be named, it reaches around 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth against 153 GB/s on the M5, with a redesigned GPU carrying up to 12 cores, up from 10. Every family from the M1 through the M5 paired its base silicon with Pro and Max derivatives, and three of them also gained an Ultra.

The base M7, codenamed Delos, targets roughly 240 GB/s and could come in the first half of 2027, with the Pro, Max, and Ultra parts grouped internally under the Andros codename. Apple is fast-tracking the line to meet demand for on-device AI and heavier graphics work. Apple has declined to comment, and none of the specifications or dates have been confirmed by the company.

Memory bandwidth dictates how fast a chip can move the large data blocks, the main bottleneck for AI inference, and the climb from 153 GB/s to 200 GB/s to a planned 240 GB/s is a roughly 56% bandwidth increase from M5 to base M7. Those are figures for the base parts. The current M3 Ultra already delivers up to 819 GB/s by fusing two Max dies, which is why the high-end tiers, not the base chips, carry the heaviest local-AI workloads. The M6 also reportedly pairs an upgraded Neural Engine with faster GPU and CPU cores.

Apple is still planning to release an M5 Ultra this year, codenamed Sotra, with around 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and tested support for up to 768GB of unified memory. It would refresh a Mac Studio that currently runs the M3 Ultra, after Apple skipped an M4 Ultra altogether.

That 768 GB ceiling sits against a current M3 Ultra Mac Studio capped at 96 GB, after Apple pulled its 512 GB tier and raised the 96 GB-to-256 GB upgrade to $2,000, then dropped the 128GB option as well. Whether the highest M5 Ultra memory tiers reach buyers depends on supply constraints; those haven’t eased and are unlikely to in the near future.

Apple raised prices across its Mac and iPad lines on Thursday, part of a crunch that outgoing CEO Tim Cook called a “hundred-year flood” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, blaming AI server demand for pulling high-bandwidth memory away from consumer hardware.

Apple has just announced that it has hiked prices for its line-up of MacBooks and iPads. MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models are expected to see prices rise by up to $400 in some cases, while the budget-friendly MacBook Neo is expected to see its MSRP rise by $100, from $599 to $699.

Luckily, we're in Amazon Prime Day sales week, and discounts are live on Amazon for several Apple MacBooks from 2026 and 2025. Now really might be your last chance to secure a decent deal on a new MacBook before Apple's new pricing structure filters down, as we'll be expecting tech retailers (including Amazon) to raise prices to match Apple's own soon enough.

● Check out these Apple deals at Amazon

These deals won't be around for long, either. With price rises now confirmed, those thinking about purchasing one of these Apple laptops will be rushing to hit the purchase button before paying extra. Stock shortages, especially on the cheapest models, could become a real possibility by the end of this sales week.

If you're interested, here are some of the best MacBook deals on sale right now, because you'll want to jump on them while you can.

Prime Day Deals on Apple MacBooks

MacBook Pro, Air, and Neo models from 2025 and 2026 are all on sale right now at Amazon for Prime Day. Amazon hasn't put all models on sale, however, but here are some of the deals we've spotted so far.

One thing to point out, however, is the MacBook Neo. Apple has just raised its MSRP to $699, meaning that Amazon's $589.99 price is $110 cheaper. This will not last long, so make sure to grab it at this price.

Other MacBook models, including the MacBook Air 2026 with a 512GB SSD, are seeing $200 price rises. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, is getting a price rise of up to $400. This isn't reflected in these Amazon deal prices yet, which have knocked up to $150 off Apple's original prices, so you're guaranteed an even bigger bargain today if you can get your order in quickly enough.

Apple MacBook Prime Day Deals

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Apple has made the unprecedented decision to hike the prices of all its current computers and tablets. iPhone prices remain as they were, for now. Bloomberg indicates that the rather steep price rises have been precipitated by increased costs of memory and storage. One of the most impactful hikes we see is the entry-level MacBook Pro going from $1,699 to $1,999. However, even the recently released but resource-starved MacBook Neo has had another $100 piled onto its price, so now it starts at $699 before tax.

In addition to Gurman’s highlighted price increases, we spotted that the cheapest Mac Studio M4 Max (mini PC desktop) has had its price increased to $2,499 from $1,999. There’s a lot to take in, so check out our at-a-glance before and after table for quick reference.

Bloomberg’s resident Apple expert, Mark Gurman, quoted an apologetic company rep. “We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions,” a spokesperson from Apple told the reporter. Other interesting assertions from that conversation were that Apple had never seen component prices rise so high, so quickly. Moreover, its representative claimed that the firm did all it could to shield customers from any knock-on device price rises, stating the company had "shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products including today’s increases for iPad and Mac."

While newsrooms might be agog at these price rises being implemented today, the writing has been on the wall of the RAMpocalypse for several months. Back in April, Tim Cook publicly forecast that the component shortages and price rises didn’t appear to be going anywhere soon. That statement came in the wake of the withdrawal of the entry-level $599 configuration of the Mac Mini, and Apple softening the blow of higher prices of its latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models by upgrading memory and other tech specs.

Until now, it seemed like Apple’s massive buying power and vertical integration had managed to help it hold off computer and tablet price increases. Today, the brakes came off, pretty dramatically.

For years, Apple kept its M1 MacBook Air around as the ultimate budget pick in its laptop lineup. Now, the M3 MacBook Air from 2024 has just hit the same heady discount heights, plunging to $799 at Amazon in the early Prime Day sale in a deal that makes the MacBook Neo look pretty tame by comparison.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The M3 MacBook Air came out in 2024, so it's a couple of years old now. However, if you want a fantastic portable machine that will give you great battery life, this is not to be sniffed at. For just $200 more, this blows the MacBook Neo out of the water. Its M3 chip has an 8-core GPU and 10-core CPU, and you also get 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. That means you get a better CPU and GPU core count, twice the RAM, twice the storage, and higher memory bandwidth versus the Neo. The M3 also offers drastically better battery life and a host of other extra features.

Both the M4 and M5 MacBook Air are on sale for around $950 at Amazon right now. That makes this deal $150 less than those more expensive options. While the M4 and M5 chips are faster than this M3 model, this older version is no slouch.

Our Geekbench testing does reveal a fairly substantial uplift on the M4 model, which scored around 3,800 in similar Geekbench 6 single-core tests and nearly 15,000 in multi-core.

What you're getting here is really the ultimate budget MacBook right now. Of course, the MacBook Neo is cheaper at $589, but for that price, you get a meager 8GB of RAM and just 256GB of storage, half what you get with the M3. The M3 has more CPU cores (10 vs 6) than the MacBook Neo, and more GPU cores (8 vs 5). Battery life is also rated for longer (18 hours versus the Neo's 16 hours), and the M3 comes with significantly better 102 GB/s maximum memory bandwidth compared to the Neo's 60 GB/s.

Versus the Neo, the M3 MacBook Air also has a higher resolution display that is slightly larger, and has better color with Wide color (P3) and True Tone Technology. The M3 also has more speakers, support for spatial audio, better microphones for calls, and support for high-impedance headphones, which you won't find on the MacBook Neo.

If you can stretch from the Neo to this $799 Macbook Air, this one is a no-brainer as a great laptop for a college student, a gift for a relative, or a high school student.

Join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that price hikes on Apple products are unavoidable because the price of memory has increased to a degree that the company must now pass on increases to customers. The outgoing chief executive of Apple did not disclose the scope of the increases or when to expect them to happen, though the warning itself is noteworthy.

Cook said in the interview that price increases had become necessary due to skyrocketing prices of LPDDR and 3D NAND memory, which the company uses in its PCs, smartphones, tablets, and other products. He noted that Apple had attempted to offset rising component costs and protect customers from higher prices, but indicated in the interview that the company could no longer absorb the increases indefinitely. While Cook declined to discuss timing or the magnitude of the planned price hikes, some Apple products may see higher prices sooner rather than later. The company already raised the base price of its Mac Mini last month and eliminated its highest-end model.

TechInsights estimates that Apple will need to hike the price of a flagship iPhone Pro model by about $270 to maintain its current gross margins, which could push flagship iPhone pricing into a substantially higher price band. To make matters worse, Apple faces rising DRAM requirements as it expands memory-hungry on-device AI capabilities.

Apple is a unique company in the sense that it is both one of the world's largest suppliers of smartphones and one of the industry's biggest PC OEMs. Still, its Mac business is negligible compared to the iPhone business.

Memory makers are more inclined to ship non-volatile NAND memory to smartphone makers as they can ship LPDDR with it, according to Nelson Duann, a senior vice president of Silicon Motion, speaking in an interview with Tom's Hardware. If Duann is correct that NAND makers prefer smartphones because they can bundle NAND and LPDDR sales, then Apple should be among the most favored customers in the industry, not among the disadvantaged ones.

Also, keep in mind that historically Apple has used long-term supply agreements, prepayments, equipment financing, and advance capacity reservations to secure key components, including DRAM, NAND flash, displays, advanced packaging, and even semiconductor foundry capacity. As one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers and semiconductor buyers, Apple is among the few companies capable of negotiating with memory suppliers from a position of considerable strength.

As a result, Apple is not in a situation where it cannot get enough memory; it can probably get more than other suppliers of smartphones and PCs, but it surely has to buy both DRAM and NAND at a premium. That said, it is not surprising that Apple will have to increase prices; what remains to be seen is the magnitude of the increase.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to “design and build” chips in the United States, posting the claim to Truth Social before either company confirmed any arrangement. Apple and Intel didn’t respond to initial requests for comment from Reuters, and neither has issued a statement acknowledging a finalized deal.

Trump says the deal is part of his administration’s push to reshore semiconductor manufacturing, writing that the U.S. needs to build its chips domestically and that he "decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our Chips right here in America.” He credited earlier government intervention for drawing Nvidia and Elon Musk's TeraFab project to Intel's foundry.

Apple already designs its own silicon and has done so since it dropped Intel processors from its products in 2020. Any arrangement here would purely be a foundry deal, with Intel acting as a contract manufacturer for chips Apple designs in-house. It wouldn’t return Apple to Intel-designed processors, and it certainly wouldn’t displace TSMC from Apple's flagship products.

The logic behind any such deal for Apple would be simple supply diversification; the company remains dependent on TSMC, whose leading-edge capacity is being absorbed by AI customers, including Nvidia and AMD. Placing a lower-volume part on a second source reduces single-foundry exposure without touching the iPhone and high-end M-series lines that rely on TSMC's most advanced nodes.

We’ve known about much of this for a little while now. Reporters caught wind of a preliminary deal last month, following discussions that ran for more than a year. Before that, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and GF Securities outlined the likely scope: Apple's M7 SoC built on Intel's 18A-P process, powering the MacBook Air and entry-level iPad Pro, with mass production targeted for late 2027.

Those two product tiers accounted for roughly 20 million units in 2025, with annual shipments expected to settle between 15 million and 20 million — significant for a new foundry customer, but small enough to leave TSMC's revenue mix intact. Reporting has also suggested that Apple's A21 iPhone chips will move to Intel's 14A node around 2028, but none of this has been confirmed by Apple or Intel.

Trump's announcement comes just two days after Intel said its 18A-P process had entered risk production, announced at the VLSI Symposium in Honolulu. The node is the first performance-enhanced version of 18A, and Intel claims it delivers 9% higher performance at the same power, or 18% lower power at the same performance, while staying design-rule compatible with 18A so customers can reuse existing IP. CEO Lip-Bu Tan told investors last month that he expects multiple foundry commitments to close in the second half of 2026.

Intel has yet to confirm a single leading-edge customer for 18A, and any commitment from Apple would be a best-case scenario in terms of securing the validation the company both desperately wants and needs. The U.S. government holds a 10% stake in Intel, and its shares rose as much as 9% in premarket trading on the news, extending a run that has lifted the stock 464% over the past 12 months to a market cap of $608.7 billion.

In a turbulent conflict-shaken world rife with geopolitical rivalry, tech export bans seem increasingly prevalent. However, history provides some context, and some fun in this case, as industry watchers rightly highlight that computer technology export bans are nothing new. Here we look back at the Apple Power Macintosh G4 export ban from 1999, and Steve Jobs making marketing gold from the situation.

In the summer of 1999, the U.S. government put export restrictions on Apple’s newly launched Power Mac G4 desktop tower systems. Being capable of a claimed performance of “over 1 billion calculations per second” meant these stylish ‘graphite’ translucent designs were “classed as a weapon” and thus routinely banned from export to 50 nations worldwide.

Though Apple naturally sought to get the restrictions lifted, according to contemporary reports, its new interim chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, didn’t miss a great marketing trick. Check out the resulting 30-second nugget of marketing gold in the video we have embedded.

“For the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the US government,” narrates the voice over, backed by the theme tune from the classic war movie The Great Escape. “With the power of over 1 billion calculations per second the Pentagon wants to ensure that the new Power Macintosh G4 does not fall into the wrong hands.” Jobs didn’t miss a chance to belittle Intel with the closing line “As for Pentium PCs, well they're harmless.”

As a reminder, the first Power Mac G4 machines, codenamed Yikes!, did indeed wield envious compute power at the time. They were marketed as offering up to double the performance of their G3 predecessors and triple that of Pentium III PCs clock-for-clock. Low End Mac recalls “The 400 MHz Yikes! (a.k.a PCI Graphics) offers 0.8-3.2 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) performance; by government definition in 1999, it was a supercomputer.”

The 400 MHz model was the entry-level model at launch, so as well as it being banned from export the faster 450 MHz and 500 MHz were also off the menu if you lived in one of the countries on the export control list at the time. Bill Clinton’s administration raised the gigaflop threshold for U.S. export controls in January 2000. Then, with the threshold raised to 6.5 GFLOPS, Apple could again begin unrestricted G4 exports.

History repeating

The latest tech export controversy headlines revolve around the recently launched version of the Anthropic Claude AI model, dubbed Fable. We have also widely reported on hardware bans, with Nvidia GPUs probably the most notable example. However, western governments have also sought to restrict exports of semiconductor tools and software to places like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea etc.

Apple introduced its next major macOS release, macOS 27 Golden Gate, at its WWDC event. The new operating system update, coming this fall, includes a series of new artificial intelligence gestures, as well as iterations to the "liquid glass" design introduced in last year's release, macOS 26 Tahoe.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that the 27 releases were focused on more polished and intuitive operating systems, trust and safety (including for children), and updates to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Unlike previous years, Apple spent most of its time highlighting changes that affect the entirety of its platforms, meaning that many of the improvements on Mac are also available in some form on the iPhone or iPad, and vice versa, reflecting the continuing deep integration in Apple's ecosystem of products, including iPhone (iOS 27), iPad (iOS 27), and watchOS (watchOS 27).

macOS will include some specific upgrades, including ultrawide display support with higher resolutions, and an updated video podcast player, while many others, like updates to iCloud shared albums and changes to Maps, are across multiple platforms. In many ways, the focus on fixes is reminiscent of 2009's OS X Snow Leopard, which was famous for fixing problems rather than introducing tons of new features.

Liquid Glass

Apple is making changes to Liquid Glass across its platforms to make content more readable and decrease distractions. Glass will now better diffuse content behind it.

A new slider in settings will let you move from from ultra-clear to fully tinted, letting you customize how much it affects readability.

Specifically on the Mac, Apple is adding a uniform tool bar across the top of apps, which harkens back to more traditional Mac design. Expanded sidebars will move to the edge of windows, and sidebar icons will regain their colors. Additionally, every window will have tighter corner radii, even if they're not updated, for improved consistency across the OS. These were all complaints from Mac diehards over the last year.

In app icons across platforms, there will be additional layers of glass in icons to make them sharper and more defined.

Improvements

Apple said that it is bringing a massive amount of improvements under the hood of macOS and other platforms, with focus on CPU usage, memory usage, display rendering, and more. Apple claims apps can launch 30% faster on the iPhone and iPad, while new photos will show up in the library up to 70% faster. The advanced CPU scheduler on the iPhone is being optimized and brought all the way back to the iPhone 11, which will be the oldest iPhone supporting iOS 27.

Network transitions — especially between cellular and Wi-Fi — were also highlighted, so you don't have to toggle as often.

The company also highlighted a new content index across Spotlight, photos, mail and more, which will index your existing files immediately and continue to do so as new content comes in. Apple demonstrated a new ranking system for mail on Mac, showing more relevant results, even if it's years old.

AI and Siri

Federighi claimed that the mission is to turn AI into helpful and intuitive products, rather than AI for the sake of AI.

"Truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Federighi said, saying it needs to be designed for devices, apps, and with privacy in mind. Surprisingly, Federighi briefly mentioned that its foundation models are integrated with Gemini and will be used "on-device and in servers" with private cloud compute. Additionally, Apple has a more powerful on-device model.

Apple SVP for Siri engineering Mike Rockwell showed off a revamped Siri. The new Siri grows out of the dynamic island with "Hey Siri" or when you hold the buttons. It retains context between interactions.

A new voice experience includes a more conversational tone. Voice can now be customized for expressivity and pace, with sliders to adjust them in a new Siri app.

Rockwell asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, and Siri told him when the concert will be. You can even inquire about tickets, which in this case were part of a lottery. Rockwell asked to be added to the lottery and to play her newest single in separate requests, as it remembered context.

He also demonstrated finding photos from a recent trip, asking Siri to pick out photos that include just specific people, and then share them with family members via text – without even having to go into the Photos app.

On iOS, you can swipe down, use the side button, or say "Hey Siri." On the Mac, Siri is integrated into Spotlight, or you can use Siri requests in system menus. One demonstration included using Siri on a Mac to help build a Maker Space at a child's school. When "How should I think about building a maker space in a shed” was typed into Spotlight, macOS realized it was a question specifically for the assistant. Siri was able to search through texts from the demonstrator's son, to address lingering electrical issues and find a fix.

Siri AI is also coming to iPadOS, where you can use the dedicated Siri App. You'll be able to see a conversational history synced with iCloud across devices, including Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone. On visionOS, you can simply look at Siri and initiate your query.

Visual Intelligence will be integrated into the iPhone camera app. You can tap the shutter button for Siri AI to “see what you see” and provide contextual information, powered by Apple Foundation models. Pointing your iPhone at a plate of food can give you nutritional information, while showing the camera an image of a restaurant bill will let you split it among friends. You can also use visual intelligence to ask about items presented on your screen.

You'll also be able to write with Siri anywhere you type. Siri can generate drafts, including emails, and will provide suggestions and automatic proofreading, available systemwide, even in third-party apps.

Siri AI won't be available in the European Union and China initially, as Apple deals with international regulation and privacy laws. Siri AI will first be available in English.

Apple Intelligence in apps

Apple also demonstrated how Intelligence can be used within and across applications, including Safari, Passwords, Photos, and Home.

In Safari, Apple has introduced tab management features, which can organize tabs into topics. Another option lets you monitor a page and asks you to "Notify me" for changes on a page, like a product coming back in stock or a ticket becoming available. You can then close the tab, but Siri will notify you when the page has changed. Perhaps the most impressive change is one to Shortcuts. You can describe what you want a Shortcut to do in natural language, and it brings together the steps automatically. One example: “When I’m leaving home, message Pedro” brings together a shortcut using Maps and Messages, which should open up Shortcuts to a much wider variety of people who may have been put off by its complicated nature.

Other demos included custom Safari extensions to adapt web pages for you, a Password app that can automatically fix compromised passwords for you on "eligible" accounts. In messages, you can get one-tap suggestions, and the phone app can find flight information when calling an airline.

For Home, Apple Intelligence can understand how a number of unrelated notifications work together to create fewer notifications and provide images from multiple security cameras. It can even track package deliveries across multiple cameras. 4K resolution will work on supported cameras.

In the Image Playground, you can create high-quality images in any style, with the image generation model running on private cloud compute. You can use natural language to adjust existing images and use it across the device, such as on your lock screen. The Photos app may have the most controversial aspects, as you can extend photos to change photo borders without cropping. There's also an option to reframe the entire scene with a spatial camera, as if you were moving the lens in the original shot. This feature works on any image in your library, even if you've taken the photos on other cameras or phones.

These features will support all languages Apple Intelligence works with. Some features will have usage limits that will adjust based on iCloud+ subscriptions.

Developers will have access to improved models, including server models, through a new API that will support natural language and images.

Lastly, Apple highlighted updates to XCode, including agentic coding, choosing the model and agent of your choice (including the newly added Google Gemini). It can connect to Figma and GitHub for design, and a new Device Hub will let developers simulate devices, including touch screens, alongside real-world testing devices.

Trust and Safety

Apple also demonstrated new child safety tools, with new child accounts and parental controls. Child accounts will automatically block adult websites and implement app store age restrictions.

Children will be able to ask parents for permission to buy or download apps in messages, as well as browse new websites in Safari for children under 13. There will be similar permissions for contacting new people outside of your family.

A new safety communication warns about nude images and intervenes, but will also be expanded to gore or violent content. Parents will have Time Allowances across entertainment, games, and social media, with shared allowances across all three, or you can set them individually. A redesigned Screen Time will let parents see how devices are being used. Developer tools are being made more capable for third-party apps to take advantage of the new features.

Golden Gate will be the first version of macOS to exclusively support Apple Silicon Macs. Last year, Apple announced that Tahoe would be the final major release to support Intel-based systems. (Intel-based Macs will still receive three years of security updates.) This is the last macOS release to support Rosetta 2, the tool that lets Apple Silicon computers run Intel applications through an emulation layer (though parts may stick around to keep legacy games running). Without Intel processors to support, Apple is urging developers to make native applications for its own silicon.

Support and Release Dates

Developer betas for the 27-suite of OS releases are available today, with public betas starting in July. Final releases are expected in the fall.

macOS 27 Golden Gate will be supported on devices with Apple Silicon. Apple's website specifies:

• MacBook Neo
• MacBook Air (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• MacBook Pro (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• iMac (2021 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac mini (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Studio (2022 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (2023)

However, adjustments to Siri's voice and advanced dictation will require newer chips on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. On the Mac, that means "an M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory." Otherwise, you need an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, or Apple Vision Pro with M5.

Thanks to AI-assisted security research, hackers with hats of various colors are finding exploits everywhere. Linux has had its worst week in years with the CopyFail and Dirty Frag root-gaining vulnerabilities, and things aren't much rosier at Microsoft, thanks to the YellowKey BitLocker bypass, as well as GreenPlasma and RedSun privilege-gaining exploits. Now, it's Apple's turn with a local privilege escalation that gets past the M5 chips' much-vaunted Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE).

There aren't many technical details, but the vulnerability is simple in practice: run a command as a standard user and gain root (administrator) access to the machine. Macs are rarely servers, so the practical impact is limited. However, the exploit remains concerning, as it's relatively easy to trick a user into running it and, with full system control, also hard to find and remove. The research team in question is named Calif, and as far as they know, the boffins there are the only ones making a public disclosure of this issue. Such assumptions are tricky in this day and age, though.

Mercifully for Captain Cook's ship, instead of being a zero-day reveal out of nowhere that left systems administrators scrambling, the exploit in question was disclosed to the company in advance (in person, no less). Calif published the vulnerability overview as part of a series of blog posts called the Month of AI-Discovered Bugs, since this new Apple vulnerability falls within a set of security findings aided by AI tools — in this case, Anthropic's Mythos Preview.

The researchers tested their code on an Apple M5 machine and macOS 26.4.1. The exploit chain impressively sneaks past MIE, a security feature present on M5 and A19 chips that labels each 16-byte memory slice with a 4-bit tag associated with the pointers that use it. MIE is enforced at the hardware level in a hypervisor-like configuration and effectively protects against most common classes of security exploits, namely, but not only, buffer overflows and use-after-free vulnerabilities.

As an oversimplification, MIE ensures that any memory read or write operation acts on the data that it was originally meant to, even at the kernel level. If that doesn't happen, either your application has a bug, or someone's up to shenanigans. The base feature is part of ARM MTE, and MIE is an Apple-added layer that enforces the said checks at the hardware level, with purportedly little to no performance overhead, and only 3% memory wastage. This blog post goes into more detail on the subject, and it's quite an interesting read.

Sources close to both Apple and Intel have said that the two companies have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture processors for Apple. According to The Wall Street Journal, the two parties have been in talks for over a year, and they’ve been finalizing a formal deal over the past few months. Apple is reportedly looking for alternative fabs to TSMC, as it wants to diversify its supply chain in the midst of ongoing chip shortages, and it seems that this latest development is a confirmation of this report.

It’s currently unclear which chips the U.S. semiconductor company will be making for the largest consumer electronics firm in the world, but it previously made the x86 processors used in Macs and MacBooks from 2006 to 2023. Intel also had the chance to build the A-series chips that Apple used for the iPhone and iPad, but it fumbled the opportunity — with Tim Cook complaining to TSMC founder Morris Chang, “Intel just does not know how to be a foundry.”

Intel apparently learned its lesson, though, as Apple was reportedly considering Intel’s 18A process for its entry-level M-series chips as early as November of last year. Even before this, the two companies were already in discussions about a potential investment into the chip maker, something that President Donald Trump alluded to in early 2026. Aside from Apple, Intel has also received a $5-billion investment from Nvidia and that the two are partnering to develop an x86 RTX SoC for PCs. Elon Musk also tapped Intel for his TeraFab project, which will use the company’s 14A process to make AI chips.

These developments are excellent news for Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who has been working hard to put the company back on track after former CEO Pat Gelsinger announced disastrous results in July 2024. It has also caused the company’s stock price to skyrocket, hitting a record high of $126.23 at the time of writing and beating its former peak during the dot-com boom of 2000. But we'll have to wait for confirmation from the two companies — as neither has officially commented on this news yet — to learn the details of this groundbreaking deal.

Apple, arguably the largest phone and computer manufacturer in the world, isn’t immune to the chip shortage, as it once again reduced the highest memory capacity available for the Mac Studio and Mac Mini. Apple's Mac Studio could be configured with up to 512GB of Unified Memory at launch, which is more than enough for professional usage and local AI applications.

Now, if you visit the Apple Store, you can only purchase the Mac Studio with a maximum of 96GB of Unified Memory, while the Mac mini is only available with up to 48GB (down from 64GB).

Apple's Unified Memory architecture has become popular for running local AI models and agentic AI applications like OpenClaw. When the latter exploded in popularity in early 2026, many AI developers and enthusiasts jumped at the opportunity to acquire a small PC with a very high memory pool. This resulted in a shortage that pushed delivery times from six days to six weeks.

This situation, combined with the global memory chip shortage, has forced Apple to discontinue the 512GB SKU and increase the price of the 256GB upgrade to $2,000 in early March. However, the increase in price did not dissuade buyers, as company chief Tim Cook warned during the company’s latest earnings call that supplies for both the Mac Studio and Mac mini could remain constrained for months.

Despite the increased prices and the removal of higher-capacity versions, delivery times for both the Mac Studio and Mac Mini haven’t improved. The M4 Max Mac Studio with 64GB of Unified Memory can take six to seven weeks to deliver, while all other configurations, including the 36GB and 96GB variants, can take between nine and 10 weeks. Prospective buyers of the M4 Mac mini with 16GB of Unified Memory may fare slightly better, with a three-to-four-week delivery window; this worsens to 10 to 12 weeks if you upgrade the memory to 24GB or 48GB.

We’re also starting to see shortages affect high-capacity MacBooks. While 24GB and lower-capacity MacBook Air laptops are still thankfully readily available, you need to wait about two to three weeks if you want the 32GB version. 48GB versions and up of the MacBook Pro also now entail a wait of one to two weeks, while even the budget MacBook Neo, which became insanely popular among students and entry-level buyers, takes around two to three weeks to deliver.

Cook said during the company’s first earnings call of 2026 that the company is chasing memory supply and that it will have a greater impact on its Q2 earnings. We’re now feeling the brunt of the shortage, as we see Macs, high-capacity MacBooks, and the entry-level MacBook Neo experience extended delivery times. Thankfully, mid-range buyers can still easily acquire the standard iMac, entry-level MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros.

Apple is reportedly talking with Intel and Samsung to produce processors for the company as it’s grappling with a shortage of chips for its latest products. According to Bloomberg, Cupertino has had multiple early-stage discussions with Team Blue, while some key Apple executives have also visited a Samsung plant that’s still in development — likely its Taylor, Texas, fab, which is set to start risk production this year.

None of the talks have resulted in any orders, so far, the report states. There have been concerns about using non-TSMC tech in Apple products, especially as it has been producing chips for the iPhone since the A8 used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. However, the AI infrastructure build-out is negatively affecting the company, with Apple CEO Tim Cook conceding that it’s constrained by TSMC’s supply of advanced chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that his company has dethroned the consumer electronics giant as TSMC’s number one customer, and even alluded that Apple might have to pay more for its chips. But even before this, Cupertino has reportedly been considering using Intel’s 18A process to build future M-series chips, especially as global geopolitical events are threatening the stability of the global supply chain.

If we look at Apple’s history, both Samsung and Intel have closely worked with the company for years. The first iPhone, all the way to the iPhone 5S, was powered by Samsung chips, while Macs and MacBooks used x86 Intel processors from 2006 until they were replaced by Apple silicon in 2023. If successful, these talks would resume Apple’s partnership with one (or both) of the companies.

This would be a win for Intel as it’s looking to land a major customer for its foundry business — something that it fumbled in 2011 when Cupertino first approached it for its custom chip needs. A move like this could also help bolster Samsung’s foundry business, as it sits at a distant second place when compared to TSMC. At the same time, it would reduce Apple’s risk of relying on a single supplier for the majority of its advanced chip supply. Even though TSMC’s Arizona plant is ramping up production and it’s estimated that it will deliver 100 million chips for Cupertino this year, it is just a fraction of Apple’s demands, with the majority of its advanced SoCs still expected to come from Taiwan.

Tim Cook has been well aware of the situation with TSMC for years now. He even said in a 2022 all-hands company meeting, “Regardless of what you may feel or think, 60% coming out of anywhere is probably not a strategic position.” This was likely highlighted with the AI-driven chip shortage. “The primary constraint is the availability of the advanced nodes our SoCs are produced on, not memory,” the Apple CEO said during the company’s latest earnings call. “I believe it will take several months to reach supply-demand balance.”

But even if Apple were to strike a deal with both Intel and Samsung today, it will take some time for production to ramp up, and consumers won’t feel its effect for several months, if not a couple of years.

Many think that Apple's history creating computers with graphical interfaces starts with the venerable Macintosh, but the company's first foray into designing GUIs actually started with 1983's Lisa. The machine was the first to bring a popular window application system and mouse control to general availability at an edible (if bitter) price of $9,995 dollars of 1983 vintage, equivalent to nearly $34,000 today.

Thanks to enthusiast and Youtuber Alex Anderson-McLeod, you'll soon be able to roll your own much-improved LisaFPGA clone. Alex designed a roomy one-board system centered around an Artix 7-100T FPGA as the Lisa's brains, coupled to 2MB of SRAM and emulated hard drive, floppy, serial, and naturally, keyboard and mouse connectors.

The clone is far superior to the original, thanks to its reliance on modern hardware and Alex's design smarts. For starters, you don't need a video converter, as the board natively outputs video HDMI with a scanline option; both its main video modes are switchable on-the-fly. Although the board includes original-spec connectors for input devices, it also helpfully has USB ports for keyboard and mouse so you don't have to procure original versions.

In a similar fashion, the serial ports can be redirected to the main USB-C connector thanks to the inclusion of a USB hub, saving you having to find USB-to-serial adapters and chunky DB25 connectors. Floppy images can be loaded from an SD card, direct connection to PC, or an original floppy drive connected to the the corresponding port.

Even for its time, the Lisa was pretty slow, thanks to its software design choices and and use of the 5 MHz variant of the Motorola 68000 CPU. As a nod to these limitations, Alex included two overclocking multipliers that can take the machine to the equivalent of 75 MHz, likewise selectable on the fly with physical switches.

The revision of the LisaFPGA featured in the video is version 2, but Alex says that version 3 is coming soon with a handful of fixes. He says the project will be fully open-sourced on Github as soon as he gets his proverbial ducks in a row. He's also considering selling the clones, and will be speaking about them at Vintage Computer Festival Southwest later in the month.

Although it was generally considered a failure due to its price and software availability, the Lisa paved the way for 1984's Macintosh, the $2,459 machine that popularized graphical interfaces and the Apple brand worldwide. The Lisa computer had an undignified ending, too, with 2,700 of them dumped in Logan, Utah, as part of a tax write-off on unsold inventory. Still, similar to how the first iPhone had major issues in hindsight, the Lisa broke ground for much greater things.

Although Apple popularized graphical home computers for the masses, Apple did not invent the GUI, nor the mouse. The GUI was Xerox's doing at its PARC laboratories, that Steve Jobs visited and, cough, cribbed notes from. The Xerox Star 8010 workstation was the first computer with both technologies, but it was sold as part of a larger package and commanded the steep price of $16,595 in 1981, or around $60,000 today. As for the mouse, it was designed at the Stanford Research institute much earlier in 1963.

Speaking during Apple’s second fiscal quarter 2026 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook warned that supplies of the company’s Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops could remain constrained for months. According to Cook, surging demand driven by artificial intelligence workloads outpaces Apple’s manufacturing capacity.

The surge comes amid growing interest in “local AI,” where models run directly on personal machines rather than on remote cloud servers. Privacy concerns, latency reductions, and rising cloud inference costs have pushed many developers and companies toward on-device AI processing.

Cook’s warning marks one of the clearest signs yet that the AI boom is beginning to reshape the personal computer market in ways that extend beyond traditional GPU manufacturers like Nvidia. The comments also officially confirm our report that some Mac models were facing significant shortages and shipping delays, primarily driven by an "ordering frenzy" for high-memory configurations, spurred by demand to run local AI agents, such as the "OpenClaw" mode.

Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio have become particularly attractive for AI development because of the company’s Apple Silicon architecture. Unlike conventional desktop systems that separate CPU and GPU memory, Apple’s unified memory architecture allows AI models to access large pools of shared high-bandwidth memory more efficiently. This makes the systems especially useful for running local large language models, AI agents, and inference workloads.

The higher-end Mac Studio configurations can also be equipped with massive amounts of unified memory, allowing developers to run increasingly large AI models directly on desktop hardware. Combined with relatively low power consumption, the systems have gained popularity among AI developers seeking alternatives to expensive server-grade hardware.

Industry observers have noted rising interest in Apple desktops from AI enthusiasts over the past year. Online developer communities have increasingly discussed using Mac Studio systems for running open-source AI models locally, particularly as demand for high-end AI GPUs continues to strain global supply chains.

Apple’s supply warning also arrives during broader pressure across the semiconductor industry. Advanced chip packaging technologies and high-bandwidth memory production have already been strained by soaring demand for AI infrastructure. Several semiconductor firms have warned of prolonged shortages tied to AI-related manufacturing bottlenecks.

The constraints may also reflect Apple’s growing ambitions in artificial intelligence. The company has been steadily expanding its AI strategy following the introduction of Apple Intelligence across its ecosystem. While Apple has historically emphasized on-device AI processing for privacy and efficiency reasons, the recent surge in demand for its desktop systems could further strengthen its position in the emerging local AI computing market.

The shortages could persist for “several months,” according to Cook, suggesting customers may face extended shipping delays for some Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations.

After failing to reignite interest in the Vision Pro with the release of the M5 model, Macrumors reports that Apple may have just about given up on the product. Initially launched on February 2, 2024, the device failed to garner the popularity typically seen with Apple products, reportedly selling only around 600,000 units. For context, the company sells hundreds of millions of iPhones each year.

At $3,499 and 1.3 pounds, the device's price and weight have been cited as contributing factors to low sales. There were initial reports dating back to 2024 that Apple was winding down production of the Vision Pro. However, the company released an updated version in late October 2025, featuring a faster M5 chip. The chip resulted in a higher 120Hz refresh rate, 10% more rendered pixels, and around.

The model also came with a redesigned headband with an upper strap to better distribute the headset's weight. Despite the additional features, the price remained $3,499. Yet, according to MacRumors, sales did not improve. Apple reportedly received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding those of any other modern Apple product.

According to Bloomberg journalist and Apple news Mark Gurman, Apple had broken up the Vision Products Group in 2025, splitting it between software and hardware engineering. In an X post yesterday (expand the tweet below), April 29, he claimed that Apple had reassigned much of the Vision Pro software team to Siri, and the hardware team to smart glasses, citing CEO John Ternus’ stance against the Vision Pro as a product.

However, this claim is being met with widespread skepticism, as readers were quick to point out what they believed were contradictory job board posts indicating that Apple was actively recruiting for the Vision Production Group. We can confirm that Apple has indeed posted several of these roles on its official job board over the past few months.

On the other hand, the job posts do not explicitly confirm the continued development of the Vision Pro. One of the posts read as follows: “Originally developed to help VisionOS achieve its critical motion-to-photon latency targets—providing users with a seamless, realistic experience through Vision Pro—our technology is now expanding to iOS and macOS.”

The mixed reports surrounding the Vision Pro have left consumers wondering exactly what is going on, especially as there has been no official report. What’s highly plausible is that the company may be developing smart glasses, a lighter, more streamlined AR offering that is still years away from consumer release.

Apple’s Pippin was plucked from the tree 30 years ago today. But it turned out to be a rotten Apple, which failed to catch the interest of the public, despite it being heralded as an open standard for home entertainment. From its launch on April 21, 1996, this expensive device with lethargic performance only sold ~42,000 units worldwide. The Pippin was put out of its misery shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the helm in 1997.

The promise of Pippin

Development of the Pippin began shortly after Japanese entertainment firm Bandai approached Apple, hoping to collaborate on a CD-ROM-based living room entertainment system. According to various sources, the project expanded from a scaled-down (680X0 era) Mac that could play games directly from CD-ROMs to a much broader home entertainment device packing a PowerPC chip.

Initial marketing pitched the Pippin as “an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment.” Interestingly, Apple didn’t want to be the sole brand behind Pippins, and the devices were ultimately made by Bandai and Katz Media.

Perhaps Apple thought its transition from Motorola 680X0 to PowerPC chips gave its new hardware an unbeatable console performance profile for the time. But despite its computing performance, the early PowerPC chips would be outmaneuvered and outclassed by the broad swing to 3D gaming in 1995/96, which the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64 all successfully capitalized on and grew.

Compared to those rivals, the Pippin looked like a rehashed version of the old guard. Like a CPU-accelerated version of the 3DO or CD32 machines that had already slid by the wayside. Thus, the Pippin definitely failed to catch the coattails of the mid-1990s zeitgeist.

Pippin hardware / software

As we’ve said, the Pippin was based on the PowerPC architecture, which Apple had recently begun transitioning to. These new chips were doing an admirable job making Macs look computationally competitive with Wintel PC clones again, but consoles and home entertainment – and the new era of 3D gaming – would shift public desires. Additionally, the Pippin’s chip, a low-end of the range PowerPC 603 @ 66 MHz, wasn’t one of the best.

Other key specs of the Pippin were its 6MB of shared memory, 128KB SRAM for saves (no HDD), and its 4x CD-ROM. There were no custom chips to offload graphics or audio processing; the single-core PPC would have to do everything.

Another drag on the Pippin was likely the chosen OS. It used a stripped-down version of Apple’s old System 7.5.2 at launch. This OS was long in the tooth at the time, and was well known for its less-than-ideal cooperative multitasking, lack of protected memory, and 68K emulation overhead. It may have been tolerable on a desktop, but it wasn’t ready-made for a slick home entertainment box.

The Pippin also suffered from a weak entertainment software library, say sources like Wikipedia. But perhaps that issue was overshadowed by the pricing of $599 (≈$1,200 today), which was double the price of the stunning-for-the-time PlayStation (PS1) or triple the price of the aggressively priced but remarkable N64.

The Pippin platform was discontinued globally in 1997, but Japanese partners would continue to hold out, unaware that the living room entertainment war was over for Apple, until 2002.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the top job to serve as executive chairman of the company's board of directors. He will be replaced by current senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, the company announced in a press release.

Cook will serve as CEO until Ternus takes the top job on September 1. The company notes that as executive chairman, Cook will continue to engage with "policymakers around the world," likely leaving him in charge of relationships with the Trump administration, China, India, and other areas where Apple has manufacturing and political interests.

Cook, 65, originally joined Apple in 1998 from Compaq. He was handpicked by Steve Jobs to become CEO in 2011, and became known for turning Apple's supply chain operation into a well-oiled international machine. Apple's press release highlights that during Cook's Tenure, "Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025."

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company," Cook said in the release. "I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world... I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with [Ternus] on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”

Ternus has worked at Apple for over 25 years and has served as an increasingly visible hardware mind in Cupertino, most recently showcasing the iPhone Air and the MacBook Neo. He also oversaw the Mac's shift to Apple Silicon and away from Intel.

Ternus began at Apple in 2001 on the product design team and rose through the ranks, overseeing hardware engineering across multiple products, including the introduction of the iPad and AirPods. Before working at Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

At 50 years old, Ternus is the same age that Cook was when he became chief executive, affording him stability and a long tenure. He will serve as Apple's eighth CEO.

Cook's legacy is likely to be one that was safe and extremely profitable. While showing off his supply chain mastery, he also introduced Apple to the services business, including Apple TV and Apple News, which has become a sector worth more than $100 billion in its own right. During Cook's leadership, the company debuted the Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Silicon Macs. Cook also promised to reduce the company's carbon footprint, including a goal to become carbon neutral by 2030.

But under Cook, Apple also faltered with artificial intelligence, and the company hasn't been on the cutting edge of the latest technology. Apple is expected to release an update to its Siri voice assistant later this year, but it will have been several times delayed and will be based on Google's Gemini model.

When he becomes CEO, Ternus will join the company's board of directors. Arthur Levinson, the company's non-executive chairman for the last 15 years, will become lead independent director.

Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, will immediately become chief hardware officer, leading the department that Ternus oversaw and getting a significantly expanded role. Srouji, who previously served at Intel and IBM, joined Apple in 2008 to lead development on A4, Apple's first system-on-a-chip, for the iPhone 4. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Srouji was looking for a bigger role or would consider leaving. Srouji told staff he "didn't plan on leaving anytime soon."

Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.' The new general-purpose CPU core set to be developed by Nuvacore is projected to excel in all data center AI workloads, and the motto of the new company is 'Engineered for Altitude.'

"For decades, the semiconductor industry has been dominated by an 'old guard,' titans of tech that design for the ground, iterating on yesterday's architecture," a statement by Nuvacore reads. "But as artificial intelligence and core infrastructure demands skyrocket, iteration is no longer enough."

Based on the description on Nuvacore's website, the company is developing a new general-purpose CPU core designed from scratch for data center and AI infrastructure, and the key focus of the all-new design is maximizing performance and area efficiency. The new high-throughput core will be optimized to efficiently sustain long-running, compute-intensive tasks, including always-on workloads such as advanced AI systems and agentic computing. The startup is funded by Sequoia Capital.

One would notice that all modern server CPUs are explicitly designed for 24/7 operation, high utilization, and long-running workloads. Sustained quality-of-service (i.e., performance and latency), reliability, and efficiency under continuous load are compulsory characteristics in the data center. However, Nuvacore positions its upcoming design as one optimized for AI-heavy, continuously saturated environments, not just general-purpose server CPUs.

Whether that translates into something materially different from existing CPUs is an open question, as the statement itself looks more like marketing than a fundamentally new characteristic of a data center processor. Perhaps, the design will be very clean and feature optimizations for working alongside AI accelerators, and/or special features to handle vast amounts of data common for AI systems.

One thing Nuvacore does not disclose is the instruction set architecture of its upcoming CPUs. Arm is certainly among the options, particularly because many hyperscalers use custom Arm-based processors for their emerging AI workloads.

Gerard Williams III is renowned for his high-performance breakthrough 64-bit Arm-based CPU cores for Apple iPhone and iPad, as well as Mac computers spanning from the Cyclone generation in 2013 (Apple A7, iPhone 5S) all the way to the Firestorm generation (M1-series CPUs, A14 application processors). At Apple, Gerard Williams worked closely with John Bruno, who was responsible for system architecture; Ram Srinivasan, a specialist in system-on-chip architecture; and Manu Gulati, who was the lead SoC architect for multiple iPhone and iPad generations from 2009 to 2017.

Having developed multiple generations of successful client platforms, Williams, Bruno, and Gulati founded Nuvia to develop high-performance Arm-based data center-grade CPU cores. Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021 with the aim of using its technologies primarily for client applications, though it is highly likely that eventually architectures developed by the ex-Nuvia team will be used for the company's data center products.

Now, Williams, Bruno, and Srinivasan plan to develop an all-new clean-sheet general-purpose CPU design specifically for 'intense, continuous demands of advanced AI systems and agentic computing.' Perhaps it is about time now that most hyperscalers have their own custom silicon programs aimed at developing compute platforms aimed specifically at diverse AI workloads. All of these companies, already investing tens of billions of dollars in their AI infrastructure, will be tremendously interested in getting their hands on a clean-sheet CPU core design better tailored for AI than general-purpose competitors.

For centuries, artisans have adjusted their tools to suit their preferences and work styles. In a similar spirit, software designer and engineer Kent Walters has used a metalworking file to round over the corners of his MacBook. On his blog, Walters shares that “people like to freak out about this,” but we think the DIYing and modding core of Tom’s Hardware readers will probably overwhelmingly support his right-to-disrepair stance.

If you’ve owned or used a modern Apple device, you may sympathize with Walters. “The bottom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the industrial designers at Apple chose an aluminum unibody partly for the fact that it can handle such a geometry,” explains the San Francisco resident. “But, it is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one's tools, so I filed it off.”

The idea seems fair, but the images Walters shares show that there’s more than a modicum of filing work done to increase the comfort of the palm rest area to an acceptable level. The eased profile is particularly rounded right below the touchpad area. Indeed, Walters says he was concerned that he might file through the unibody when doing this, but thankfully not.

MacBook bullnosing DIY tips

If you are also barely tolerating the sharp edges of your MacBook, Walters has some advice. Inspired DIYers should tape off the speakers and keyboard before lifting their metalworking file, he suggests. That will obviously minimize the ingress of aluminum filings. Clamping the notebook to a rigid surface is also recommended to help you work with accuracy.

To round the edges off the MacBook palmrest, as pictured, Walters started with “a fairly rough file, as that is what I had on hand, and then sanded with 150 then 400 grit sandpaper.” He notes that this work was done months before the pictures, so the finish has earned a few battle scars since – a few scratches and dings.

Finally, thrifty folks who will keep their devices as pristine as possible to maximize resale potential down the road probably aren’t the best match for this kind of project.

Whether you're a student submitting homework, at work typing away at documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, or you're just someone who wants to access resources online and connect with family and friends, you want a laptop with the components and features you'll need to get the job done. That means a great screen, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life (and nice design doesn't hurt, either!).

The laptop space is more competitive than ever. Windows machines come from many companies using silicon from three major CPU vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Apple, meanwhile, has a range of powerful and portable systems based on its own Apple Silicon.

In 2026, Intel's most recent chips are its Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) chips, code-named Panther Lake, while AMD launched its "Gorgon Point" Ryzen AI processors at CES. At Computex, Nvidia announced that its RTX Spark chips will launch in laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and more starting in the fall, taking on Qualcomm in the Windows on Arm space. Earlier this year, Qualcomm released its Snapdragon X2 Elite Xtreme, Elite, and Plus chips.

On Macs, Apple's top chips are the M5 series, including the M5 Pro and M5 Max, which can be found in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup.

Best Laptops You Can Buy Today

The Best Laptop (and Mac) overall

The MacBook Air has been a go-to laptop recommendation for quite some time, thanks to strong performance, a fanless design, excellent built quality, and long-lasting battery life. With the version of the chip with M5, you get the benefits of years of hardware revisions since the Air's last redesign with M2, including a minimum 16GB of RAM and a 12-megapixel webcam.

The M5 chip in the MacBook Air showed off excellent single and multi-core performance. In fact, it;s closest rival was the same chip in the MacBook Pro, which gets a boost because of an active fan.

That being said, the system can throttle under heavy workloads like rendering. But for most people's typical tasks, including writing, editing, making spreadsheets, editing photos, listening to music, programming, and general multitasking, you'll have a very powerful machine.

Apple has boosted the base MacBook Air's price to $1,099, but it now starts with 512GB of memory. Given the price of components these days, the laptop is still a great value. If you want a Mac but don't want to spend that much for it, you could take a step down to the entry-level MacBook Neo, starting at $599, as long as you're willing to sacrifice on power, memory, ports, and a backlit keyboard.

Read: MacBook Air (M5) review

Best Windows laptop

The Dell XPS 14 is back, and while you might expect its performance or design to be the headlining feature, it's the battery life that wows. With its base 1920 x 1200 LCD display, which has a variable refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1 Hz, it lasted 20 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

That's not to say the battery life is all there is to like about this laptop. The 3-pound chassis is sleek, and Dell added a function row back to the keyboard, making it way easier to use over the touch bar of yesteryear.

If you're OK with 12 hours of charge, more expensive models with a tandem OLED display have way better colors and more powerful Arc B390 integrated graphics.

That being said, both of them have a low-travel keyboard without space between the keys, which definitely tripped up my fingers, so you'll need time to get your muscle memory going. And the starting price, at $1,600, is a lot to ask but is unfortunately common as the memory crisis rages on.

Read: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review

Best ultralight laptop

Some of the best laptops are barely noticeable in your bag. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, at 2.15 pounds is extremely light.

Still, despite the weight, you get plenty of other benefits. The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop of this size. Perhaps most impressively, the system ran for 16 hours and 38 minutes on our battery test, outlasting many of the laptops we bit against it by multiple hours.

The system also offers a lovely display. The POLED touchscreen measured 476 nits of brightness while falling in similar gamut ranges as other OLED notebooks that weren't as luminous.

There are some downsides. There are limited ports outside of Thunderbolt 4/USB-C, including a lack of a headphone jack. And CPU performance fell behind some competitors, like Apple's M5 MacBook Air and a thicker AMD-based 2-in-1 from HP.Still, the laptop impressed for its airiness and multimedia strengths. And as tested with 32GB at $1,519, it's not a crazy price as the costs of many laptops skyrocket during an ongoing component shortage.

Read: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review

Another great Windows clamshell

We can argue about how much the AI PC is really any sort of revolution, but there are still some strong ultraportables coming out. The HP OmniBook Ultra puts the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in a sleek chassis with strong productivity performance.

HP is offering up decent battery life here, running for 12 hours and 52 minutes on our battery test. That's not the best, but all things considered including the high-resolution display, it's not bad. It's also nice to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on an AMD system, which is exceedingly rare.

The experience is knocked down a bit by a significant amount of bloatware, but if you're looking for a strong AMD laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra is a strong competitor if you don't mind doing some uninstalling.

Read: HP OmniBook Ultra review

The best budget laptop

If you're looking for an affordable laptop, Apple does it best these days. The MacBook Neo starts at $599 ($499 with an education discount), but you rarely feel like you're not getting enough – unlike most Windows laptops in this price range. The Neo has a premium, all-metal chassis, a bright, vivid screen, and a custom mechanical trackpad that lets you click anywhere. And yes, you get all of macOS running on what was formerly an iPhone chip.

The quality of the 13-inch chassis and screen are key here. You're not getting something plastic. You're not getting something low-resolution, and you're not getting something dim. You also get a great webcam for this price range, and the system stays remarkably cool. There are some niceties you sacrifice, however. Apple has gone without a backlit keyboard. And the two USB ports aren't labeled, so you'll have to remember which is the faster 10 Gbps USB 3 port (the back one) for backup drives and monitors, lest you end up with an error message.

I suspect that most people with light workloads — especially students and people using home computers doing a lot of work in the browser — won't have too much trouble with the 8GB of RAM. That being said, 16GB systems can be found in the Windows world for a bit more money, though you'll need to hunt for sales.

But if a premium laptop experience (including great build quality and a high-res screen) are important to you, Apple delivers that better than any Windows machine priced close to the Neo’s $599 starting price.

Read: MacBook Neo review

The Best Laptop for work

There are plenty of reasons why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a classic. It's thin design and strong build quality are beloved by ThinkPad diehards. The latest model, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), offers long battery life and great speakers.

Perhaps most critically, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an excellent keyboard. Lenovo's reputation was built on great typing experiences, so this is crucial. For those who love Lenovo's TrackPoint, it's still here, allowing you to move the mouse without ever taking your fingers away from the home row on the keyboard.

The latest version comes with Intel's 13th Gen Core processors. We reviewed it with a Core i7-1355U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The one real issue we had is that the base screen could benefit from being a bit brighter. Those who want the most vivid experience can opt for an OLED panel, but at a higher price.

When shopping for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), keep an eye out for Lenovo's frequent sales, as there's often a deal available.

Read: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11) Review

The Best Windows Tablet

Microsoft may push the Surface Pro as a do-it-all AI machine, but the truth is it's just a really nice, portable, slim PC that lasts a long time on a battery and includes a beautiful OLED display. It's definitively one of the best Surfaces to date.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors offer enough performance to keep up with x86 competitors, making this one of the first Arm-based Surfaces that doesn't feel like it's lacking. Add on more Arm-compatible apps than ever, including the Chrome browser, and there's far less to miss from previous Intel models. That's not to say it's perfect — there are still some gaming issues, as well as drivers for specialized peripherals that may need to be rebuilt for the new platform.

The 45 TOPS NPU powers some of Windows 11's Copilot+ features, like Cocreator, Live Captions, and Windows Studio effects. None of these are showstoppers, but they're cool tricks.'

If you want a premium tablet running Windows 11, the Surface Pro is one of the only premium games in town. And that means paying a premium for a separate keyboard. But for those who love this form factor, the Surface Pro remains the best option out there.

Read: Microsoft Surface Pro review

A more powerful Mac laptop

The MacBook Air is a great starting point, but if you want an air-cooled processor and a few more features, the base MacBook Pro adds a few niceties. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M5 processor, has three Thunderbolt ports (including one on the right side), and a beautiful micro LED display.

For those willing to spend an extra $150, there's a nano-texture display option that is completely worth it if you ever use your laptop outside. The matte display looks excellent, and was great on desks near windows.

If you need the most power possible, we also reviewed the MacBook Pro with an M5 Max, including a 40-core GPU, a mix of Apple's latest performance and super cores, and a blazing fast SSD.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch laptops offer great speakers and beautiful displays, but you will have to pay quite a bit for any storage or memory upgrades you want, and you won't be able to make changes later.

Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5) review
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) review

The Best Gaming laptop

Razer Blade 18 offers some of the strongest gaming performance we've seen in a laptop, but also features excellent design, comfortable features, and the latest connection standards. At $5,199.99 as tested, it sure should be good. It tops our list of the best gaming laptops.

The major highlight is the dual-mode display, which has two options: 3840 x 2400 at 240 Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440 Hz. Those two choices (which you can switch between in Razer Synapse) is enough to showcase both intensive, graphics-driven games at high settings and esports where frames are more important than resolution and detail.

The laptop, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in our review configuration, outperformed the field in our gaming tests, especially at the lower resolution.Razer is one of the few laptop makers using Thunderbolt 5 ports (we've also seen them from MSI and Apple), so this system is ready to go if you're using advanced peripherals or the fastest external storage drives.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that the Blade's dual 2TB storage drives use PCIe 4.0 rather than 5.0. You won’t notice this in games or mainstream productivity, but if you want PCIe 5.0 speed for future proofing or 8K video editing, the Titan may still be the way to go. The Blade 18 does support PCIe 5.0 drives, if you want to upgrade to speedier storage in the future.

Read: Razer Blade 18 review

Other Laptops We Tested

💻 Asus Zenbook A16

The Zenbook A16 has Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor, including 48GB of RAM on the package. While the chip is fast, the laptop, while lightweight, didn't meet our expectations. While light, it flexed and didn't feel premium; battery life was lesser than competitors; and while emulation is better than it used to be, there are still some compatibility issues with Windows on Arm for power users.

Read: Asus Zenbook A16 review

💻 Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra

Samsung's Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a powerful system for creatives, thanks in part to the RTX 5070 GPU in the version we tested. The OLED screen is beautiful and you get an nice design (albeit one that is quite similar to Macs), but this laptop is pricey, and you get a shallow keyboard.

Read: Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra review

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Apple, founded in 1977 to sell hobbyist computers, is currently celebrating its 50th year and is one of the most valuable companies today. However, this wasn’t the case back then, with venture capital firm Sequoia Capital sharing its founder’s memo regarding a potential $600,000 financing for the then-fledgling firm. According to the firm’s X post, its founder, Don Valentine, wrote the note, saying that Apple’s request will give it 10% of equity in the startup with a market greater than $500 million.

“Leading company in a hot biz… $600k buys 10% — very rich deal, management questionable for evaluation. Proposed financing structure: $60k to A.L-S, $60k to AG — friends of CMS, $480k to one venture investor… invitees: 1) Venrock 2) CMS 3) A. Rock 4) Bank Amer 5) Citicorp — Venrock has inside track, CMS second,” Valentine said in the memo. “Will be tough to do this deal: small amt available, high price, second position. CMS wants guarantee of min $, at least $100k & we will decide in Dec.”

Since Apple was a private entity back in 1977, we do not have a public record of how much each share of the company cost at that time. However, it went public in 1980, selling 4.6 million shares at $22 per share. That meant that Sequioa Capital’s $600,000 investment was already worth $10,120,000 at that time, turning early investors into millionaires. The company has since gone through multiple stock splits, meaning a single share from 1980 is equal to 224 today. That makes the original 460,000 shares under consideration by the venture capital firm in 1977 worth approximately $26.4 billion today, not counting the dividends that Apple released through the years.

This shows how far Apple has come through the years, from a fledgling company focused on selling kits to computer enthusiasts to making one of the most ubiquitous devices on the planet. Valentine initially had doubts about the deal, saying that it was rather expensive and that only a small amount was available for other investors. He also had doubts about the company’s management, which listed M. Markkula as the Chairman/CEO and S. Jobs and S. Melnick as “Eng Founders.” Nevertheless, Sequoia Capital’s investment in the company would turn out to be a good decision, with Apple eventually churning out groundbreaking products like the Macintosh, the iMac G3, the iPod, the iPhone, and Apple Silicon.

Apple is 50 years old. The consumer tech giant, famous for the iPhone, AirPods, and, yes, its Mac laptops and desktops, has a larger footprint than ever. It also now encompasses TV production, music streaming apps, a massive App Store, and even a $599 system for the masses, the MacBook Neo. But all of that is rooted in a tradition of hobbyist computing, starting with the company's first product: the Apple-1.

Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1976 as a partnership between Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (of Atari fame, who was at Apple very briefly and worked on documentation). The company was built around the Apple-1, designed by Wozniak, and officially incorporated in Cupertino, California, in January 1977.

In retellings of the Apple legend, Wozniak was the true engineer, who was working at HP at the time. Jobs had an interest in electronics (and was reportedly pretty good at soldering at his job at Atari), but he was more of a marketing guy.

Either way, the pair, along with the early team they built, didn't have a company based on lifestyle – at least not yet. It was based in the hobbyist PC space. The Apple-1 came without a case, a keyboard, or a power supply, but did include a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and four kilobytes of memory. If you wanted to run Integer BASIC, you needed to do it on a cassette. Only about 200 were ever made, mostly for Byte Shop in nearby Mountain View.

At the time, the Apple-1 delivered a surprising amount of convenience for personal computing. Even though you still had to bring many components, the board was built and tested. Wozniak would show it off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, to acclaim.But it was the Apple II that brought Apple's computers to the masses, assembling everything together, including the keyboard and case. You would use a television to serve as the screen. Heck, BASIC was even stored in memory. The Apple II was an iconic beige box that would be popularized by two further advancements in computing: a floppy disk drive and VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program, which boosted its popularity.

There would be many variations on the Apple II, including the ill-fated Apple III, the upgraded Apple IIe, and the Lisa, the first commercially available PC with a GUI and mouse (inspired by work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, such as the Xerox Alto), which was quite expensive at $9,995.

But in 1984, following an internal power struggle, a second computing group within Apple revealed the Macintosh (later the Macintosh 128K), bringing forward the idea of the "all-in-one" PC, which included a monitor. There would be many variations in the Mac line, but they'd become popularized again in 1998, when Jobs, back from his exile from the company from 1985 through 1997, announced the iMac G3, designed by Jony Ive, in Bondi Blue. That would be followed by multiple colorways on the portable iBook laptops.

There would be hits (the iMac G4, with a modern design between a lamp and a flower) and misses. The Power Mac G4 Cube was a gorgeous machine with cosmetic issues in the injection-molded plastic and cooling issues thanks to its fanless design. The press release about Apple suspending production lives on on its website.

In 2001, Apple released the iPod, promising "1,000 songs in your pocket." The third-gen iPod, in 2003, added support for Windows, helping propel it to be one of the most popular consumer devices of all time. In 2007, Apple would launch the iPhone, which would take over the American smartphone market, become the company's largest focus and flagship product, and introduce the App Store, a huge business success for the company, as well as other services like iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple Pay. (The iPhone would ultimately lead to the death of Flash and the headphone jack on phones, but change the way many people use devices forever.)

But the next biggest hit would be the MacBook Air. By this time, Apple was firmly in its Intel era. Sure, it was extremely expensive when it launched in 2008, starting at $1,799 with an 80GB HDD and a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (a 64GB SSD was an upgrade option!). But when Jobs pulled that computer out of a manila envelope, the tech world was stunned. It was stunned again when, in 2010, Apple redesigned the Air in two sizes: 11- and 13.3-inches, starting at $999 for the smaller model and $1,299 for the larger one (and it got rid of the spinning hard drive).

The MacBook Air would push leading PC companies to chase Apple in laptops for well more than a decade, as Dell updated the XPS line, HP jumped to the premium Spectre, and even Lenovo's ThinkPads saw the X1 series.

The MacBook Air would stay in the spotlight, 12 years later. Following some hum-dum upgrades in Apple's last Intel years, including the lackluster Touch Bar (in fact, in 2018, with little attention, I wrote for Laptop Mag that Apple needed to either upgrade or kill the laptop), it would be one of the first machines, along with the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, to ditch Intel and move to Apple's first in-house silicon, the M1 system-on-a-chip. It was widely seen as a success.

Today, Macs don't have the kind of modularity or upgradeability they had when Wozniak showed off the Apple-1 at the Homebrew Computer Club. But with the release of the $599 MacBook Neo, time has caught up with Apple at 50 years old. There's another computer that feels like an all-in-one package for more people. But there are more challenges to come, as Apple faces a new world focused on AI, with new players and competitors. While the company still seems to be trying to deliver on promises around Apple Intelligence, the company has partnered with Google to use Gemini models to make an AI-focused Siri.

The 50-year anniversary has inspired celebrations, with museum collections, like the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Georgia showing off over 2,000 artifacts related to the company's history, and the vaunted Computer History Museum in Mountain View offering special programming. Apple has had an array of concerts and other performances at stores globally. But for most, it's just Wednesday, even if you have an iPhone in your pocket.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has issued a direct strike threat to a slew of U.S. tech companies, including GPU giant Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, IBM, Cisco, and Tesla, just days after the regime identified the companies as 'legitimate targets.' As reported by CBS News, the IRGC issued an updated and more direct threat via Telegram on Tuesday.

Per the report, the group claimed that it would begin targeting some 18 U.S. and finance companies, specifically their Middle Eastern presences. As noted, the IRGC has already threatened these companies; however, Tuesday's statement represents a marked escalation in rhetorical threat.

The IRGC reportedly stated that the U.S. has "ignored our repeated warnings about the need to stop terrorist operations, and today, a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in your and your Israeli allies' terrorist attacks; Since the main element in designing and tracking terror targets are American ICT and AI companies, in response to this terrorist operation, from now on the main institutions effective in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets."

Strikingly, the IRGC warned employees of the named institutions, which also include J.P. Morgan, to "leave their workplaces immediately to save their lives." Residents around these terrorist companies in all countries in the region should also leave their places within a radius of one kilometer and go to a safe place," Iran's armed forces stated. WION further reports the statement, which said: "These companies should expect destruction of their facilities in response to each act of terror in Iran." According to that outlet, strikes could begin as soon as 8 pm Tehran time on April 1.

As noted in our previous coverage, companies like Nvidia and Intel maintain significant Middle Eastern presences. 13% of Nvidia's global workforce resides in Israel, where the company has its second-largest R&D center beyond U.S. shores. Similarly, Intel employs some 9,355 people in Israel.

Beyond these specific threats of military force against U.S. tech institutions, the Iran conflict continues to have widespread ramifications in the tech industry. AWS data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been struck by drones, and significant stress on the global Helium supply could have devastating consequences for chipmaking.

Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Roswell, GA, will open the doors to its iNSPIRE: 50 Years of Innovation from Apple exhibition on Wednesday, April 1. The exhibit organizers say this is a first-of-its-kind exhibition and will feature more than 2,000 artifacts across 20,000 square feet. That makes it “the World’s Largest Collection of Apple Products,” according to the Mimms PR department. We’ve got some pre-opening images and details to share.

According to our research, Mimms won’t actually be showing off the world’s largest Apple hardware exhibit, though. That prize goes to the All About Apple Museum (Savona, Italy) with over 9,000 items, and a living museum area where visitors can interact with many old computers and devices. Mimms comes in second place, though!

A ribbon-cutting grand opening event for iNSPIRE is scheduled for 10am on Wednesday, with public access to the extensive artifacts and installations beginning at 12 noon.

Yes, it really has been 50 years since Apple Inc. was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Its 1976 launch product was the Apple I personal computer. A year later, the company would be incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer Inc.

To mark this significant historical milestone, Apple will start its half-century celebrations in earnest. It even has a new Instagram account lined up for the event. However, Apple fans who’d prefer something more tangible and physical to get into a celebratory mood can visit Mimms in Roswell.

At the iNSPIRE: 50 Years of Innovation from Apple exhibition

Central to the exhibit are the 2,000+ artifacts from what has become one of the world’s most influential brands. There will be oodles of hardware to see. Besides that, visitors can check out “Rare collector’s items, unique documents, and behind-the-scenes stories of Apple’s groundbreaking product.”

As a technology and art museum, Mimms isn’t just shoving a load of old tech in glass boxes, of course. The museum is promising some hands-on displays of Apple’s early computers and devices. Moreover, “immersive, creative installations inspired by Apple’s most memorable campaigns,” will be part of the visitor experience.

Spoiler alert – we have some details and photos of some of the immersive exhibits, like the Motion-based trivia experience, iCloud floor interactivity, and the iPad drawing wall.

Museum admission is $22 for adults, $16 for kids (4 to 17), and a family of four can enter for $66. Mimms also offers concessions to seniors, military, and college students. Taking photos and sharing them online is encouraged.

Coincidentally, the Apple Museum Utrecht (Netherlands) will open its doors for the first time on April 2. There, you will be able to visit the massive wall of 100 iMac G3s, and enjoy walking around a full-scale replica of the Jobs' family garage.

This week, Apple’s Mac OS X hit a quarter-century milestone. It officially launched on March 24, 2001, though a public beta had been available for tinkerers for almost six months. Heralded by Steve Jobs as “the future of the Mac,” the fresh new operating system presented an ‘Aqua’ aesthetic dipped GUI over a Unix-based foundation. In 2026, even after three upheavals to the underlying Mac computer architecture, OS X is more popular than ever, and looks set to win flocks of new converts with the affordable MacBook Neo.

You can’t just launch an OS on an established platform without some mitigations and workarounds. I remember at the time of OS X’s introduction, we had a very polished ‘classic’ Mac OS version 9, though it may have been slightly fragile. As a transition user (I used Macs at work and home at the time), OS X felt rough, a big step backwards in usability, despite all the marketing bombast of Jobs and Co. For several years, Mac users had to juggle with ‘Carbon’ apps running natively and others causing the computer to start up the ‘Classic’ environment – an OS9 instance in a sandbox.

It wasn’t a very smooth experience mixing legacy and newer applications for several years. Nevertheless, in many ways, it was an achievement by Apple to transition its users from one OS to another while gaining popularity. This transition occurred when Macs were enjoying pretty good momentum from the colorful iMac G3 era.

Stepping back a little, it must be remembered that Apple’s development teams already had transitional success moving from the Motorola 680X0 architecture (from 1984 to around 1994-6) to PowerPC (1994 to 2006). They might have had an inkling at the time of OS X’s development and release that there would be another underlying hardware shakeup on the way.

Apple’s developers were very likely better prepared for the PowerPC to Intel architecture transition, not only thanks to prior experience, but also due to the UNIX underpinnings of OS X being built on components that already had portable multi-architecture support. While the 68K to PPC transition saw the necessity is the mother of invention, ‘fat binaries’ of mixed architecture code were introduced, OS X reused this concept with ‘Universal Binaries.’ Moreover, the Rosetta PPC-x86 (2006) translator was simpler than the 68K emulator that the first versions of Mac OS X had to incorporate.

OS X was introduced to modernize Apple’s desktop OS with features like protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a real kernel, and modern graphics stack. However, probably by accident rather than design, it ended up being much easier to transition to Intel.

The latest version of Mac OS X is currently macOS 26 (they changed the nomenclature about a decade ago), Tahoe. Apple’s grown-up OS hasn’t risen without a few of its own ‘Vista’ or ‘Windows 11’ moments over the years, though. For example, the newest release has been criticized for gatekeeper tightening behavior, making running unapproved or unsigned apps tricker than before. It also had a ‘Vista UAC’ type issue with users being annoyed by re-authorization prompts for app permissions.

The MacBook Air has topped our list of the best ultrabooks and premium laptops in recent years because of its mix of premium design, battery life, and performance that make it a go-to recommendation for anyone already on a Mac or looking to make the jump from Windows. The latest incarnation, the MacBook Air with M5 ($1,099 to start, $1,299 as tested), continues the trend, capitalizing on the series of subtle tweaks in its predecessors.

Apple has ditched the $999 starting price for the 13-inch system we're reviewing here, likely a mix of component shortages and pricing strategies related to the new budget-focused MacBook Neo. But $1,099 does get you a larger 512GB SSD over the previous 256GB base spec.

Despite the slight price bump, the mix of power, style, and longevity is still enough to easily recommend the MacBook Air to most people, especially those who don't need to run Windows. And all of the features that the MacBook Air offers still give it a clear space in the lineup that's worth saving up for over the Neo, if you can afford it.

Design of the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air with M5 sports the same design that Apple revealed back in 2022, when the M2 Air was the first Mac hardware built specifically around Apple Silicon. The design has aged well, and this one comes in the same colors as last year. Our review unit is a pale "sky" blue, the color introduced in 2025, which could be mistaken for silver in some lighting conditions.

The same aluminum design remains, with rounded edges and flat surfaces. It's handsome, if a bit familiar at this point. When you open the lid, which features Apple's logo in reflective tone-on-tone metal, you're greeted with the one real sin of this design: a notch into the display that houses the webcam. I've never quite gotten over it (in fact, the cheaper MacBook Neo's thicker bezel helped Apple avoid one completely).

Most of the MacBook Air's ports are on the left side of the notebook. These include MagSafe for charging and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports. On the right side, there's a lone 3.5 mm headphone jack.

At 2.7 pounds and 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches, the 13-inch MacBook Air can easily slide into a backpack relatively unnoticed. The Dell XPS 14, a Windows laptop noticeably inspired by the design, is 3 pounds and 12.19 x 8.26 x 0.6 inches. Apple's MacBook Neo, the new gateway laptop to the Apple ecosystem, weighs the same as the MacBook Air and is 0.6 mm taller, but has a smaller footprint at 11.71 x 8.12 x 0.5 inches.

MacBook Air (13-inch, M5) Specifications

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air puts Apple's M5 in a fanless chassis. Even without air cooling, the chip is quite powerful.

Our competitors here are the MacBook Pro with M5, which puts the M5 under air, as well as the Dell XPS 14 with a Core Ultra 7 3355 and an Asus ZenBook Duo with Core Ultra X9 388H. For an alternative ARM system, there's the Acer Swift 14 AI with the aging Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100). Lastly, there are some comparisons to the 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 that we reviewed last year.

On Geekbench 6, the Air notched a single-core score of 4,168 and a multi-core score of 17,067. That made the M5's biggest competition itself, but cooler. The M5 MacBook Pro hit a single-core score of 4,288 and a multi-core score of 17,926. Intel's Core Ultra X9 388H had a higher-multi-core score than the Air's M5 at 17,283, but given the Asus that houses it is almost twice the price of the MacBook Air, that's not a huge difference. Apple's M4 didn't do as well as M5, but it's single-core score still beats the Intel chips.

On our file transfer test, the MacBook Air copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,924.84 MBps, just ahead of the M5 MacBook Pro and faster than both Intel systems tested here.

The M5 MacBook Air took 4 minutes and 41 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p in Handbrake, a slight increase over M4 (4:52). The MacBook Pro did it over a minute faster with air cooling (3:31), while the Zenbook Duo also beat the Air, at 4:22. This was where the Acer Swift 14 with Snapdragon was the most competitive, coming in at 4:46.

On the Xcode Benchmark, the MacBook Air took 165 seconds to compile a large codebase using Apple's developer tools. The MacBook Pro did it in 145 seconds.

It wasn't surprising to see the M5 thermally throttle in this fanless chassis. On our Cinebench 2026 stress test, the chip started with a score of 3,415, slowly decreasing over the first few runs, until it settled in the low 2,300's. Apple doesn't allow monitoring software like TG Pro to access clock speeds, but Cinebench estimates that M5 runs single-core at 4.3 GHz and multi-core at 3.6 GHz in this laptop.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Air

The MacBook Air's integrated 10-core GPU has access to the 16GB of unified memory in our review unit. In this fanless design, the GPU is subject to similar thermal throttling as the CPU.

I tried playing InZoi, the same life simulator game I played on the MacBook Pro with M5 Max, on the Air. In this case, though, I had it set to 1680 x 1050, used MetalFX in performance mode, and very low settings, but still had hardware ray tracing enabled. The game ran between 40 and 55 frames per second, depending on the environment the characters were in.

The Air earned a score of 1,005 on the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, falling behind the cooled M5 in the MacBook Pro at 1,122 and the integrated Intel Arc B390 in the Asus Zenbook Duo's Core Ultra X9 388H (but again, that's a far more expensive laptop). The Air was far more graphically competent than the Dell XPS 14's integrated Intel graphics, which delivered just 532 points. We don't have data for this test for M4, as we've started using it on Macs recently.

Display on the on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The 13-inch screen on the MacBook Air is actually 13.6-inches, making it 0.6 inches larger than the MacBook Neo. The Air's display has a 2560 x 1664 "Liquid Retina" LED display with IPS and Apple's True Tone, which adjusts the screen's color temperature based on ambient lighting.

I used the MacBook Air to watch the debut trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the hero's new red and blue suit shone brightly against grayer, darker backgrounds as he dove off a building and confronted the Punisher.

At 83.1% DCI-P3 color Volume and 117.3% sRGB, the Air was on par with the MacBook Pro, despite the latter's mini LED screen. The Asus ZenBook Duo's dual OLED screens, however, were slightly more vivid, while the XPS 14 trailed the group here.

At 458.8 nits, the Air's display gets suitably bright, but the MacBook Pro got almost 100 nits brighter. The Dell XPS 14 beat the Air ever so slightly at 466 nits of brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The keyboard on the MacBook Air may not have the most travel, but it's quite comfortable. I love typing on it. The layout just makes sense, with full-sized function keys and inverted-T arrow keys. The power button features Touch ID to log in easily.

On the Monkeytype typing test, I hit 114 words per minute with 98% accuracy, which is close to my best.

My only quibble with the MacBook Air's keys is one that is also on this year's MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro lines, as well; Apple has removed the words from the delete, enter, shift, caps lock, and tab keys and replaced them with glyphs that are familiar to those who have used the iOS keyboard. As a touch typist, it's not actually that big of a deal, but I don't think it's as clear as it could be. (For what it's worth, these glyphs have been on alternate language keyboards before. We're just seeing it now in U.S. English.) On the bright side, the modifier keys maintain their text.

Apple's haptic touchpads remain among the best in the industry. They support tons of fluid, accurate gestures, feel good against the fingertip, and have convincing feedback that feels like a real click. Very few others come close.

Audio on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

Apple's quad speakers on the MacBook Pro sound quite good and get loud enough to fill a room. In our photography studio, I listened to Metric's "Victim of Luck" and was pleased by clear vocals, synths, and keys, as well as some snappy drums. The bass isn't as good as the thicker MacBook Pro, but at least there is some, which you rarely get on a laptop this thin.

If you prefer to use the 3.5 mm headphone jack, Apple offers support for high-impedance headphones.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

While there are four pentalobe screws on the underside of the MacBook Air, removing them won't get you very far, as the RAM and storage are soldered down. As usual, the recommendation with a Mac is to buy the best one you can at the time of purchase, because you won't be able to adjust down the line.Most people who need repairs are likely to make an appointment at a Genius Bar. For those with access to parts, Apple did drop a repair manual for the MacBook Air on launch day (as well as the Pro and Neo).

Battery Life on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air lasts long enough on a charge. On our battery test, which involves web browsing, streaming video, and light OpenGL benchmarks with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness, it lasted for 15 hours and 28 minutes. That's roughly the same as the 15-inch M4 model we tested last year (15:14).

And while that's nothing to sneeze at, and is effectively all-day battery life, you can go higher. The MacBook Pro with M5, with a larger 72.4 WHr battery, ran for 18:14. The Dell XPS 14 ran for 20:41, albeit with a lower-resolution display. Another ARM-based competitor, the Snapdragon X Elite-based Swift 14, also ran longer at 17:32.

Heat on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

Despite the lack of a fan, the MacBook Air doesn't get uncomfortably hot. We took skin temperatures while running our Cinebench stress test, and while the system heated up, it was never uncomfortable to the point where you couldn't use it.

The center of the keyboard measured 105.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is noticeable, but the touchpad was cooler at 96 F. The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop measured 107.9 F.

TG Pro, which measures system temperatures and can control fan speeds, measured the M5 SOC at 63.24 degrees Celsius.

Webcam on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air has a 12MP webcam in its notch. In everyday usage, I have no complaints. The webcam caught every hair on my head (fortunate!) some wrinkles under my eyes (unfortunate!), and even some detail in our office's industrial ceiling with speckled paint.

The camera, dubbed "Center Stage," is named after a macOS feature that lets the camera focus on you as you move around. I don't use it much, as I tend to sit in one place on calls.

Software and Warranty on the MacBook Air (13-inch, M5)

The MacBook Air comes with the latest version of macOS 26, also known as Tahoe. We went into that more in our review of the Macbook Pro with M5. Tahoe includes the "liquid glass" design overhaul that includes lots of icons and translucent effects, as well as a big update to Spotlight that adds many actions, a built-in clipboard history, and far more automations for shortcuts.

Built-in apps include Safari, Messages, Reminders, Maps, FaceTime, Photos, Apple TV, Music, and more. You still get free versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, though newer versions come as part of Apple's Creator Studio subscription service, along with Compression, Motion, FInal Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Mainstage, and Pixelmator Pro.

Apple sells the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1-year warranty. AppleCare+, which covers repairs, battery replacement, and priority support, is $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year (it is also available as part of AppleCare One for $19.99 per month, covering up to three products). The 15-inch Air drops up to $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually.

MacBook Air (13-inch, M5) Configurations

We tested a 13-inch MacBook Air with an Apple M5 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a blue "sky" colorway. That configuration costs $1,299.

Apple has eliminated the $999 base price. This year, the 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099, albeit with 512GB of storage rather than the 256GB of storage at the previous starting price. That system also has an 8-core GPU.

If you want more than 16GB, you need the M5 chip with the 10-core GPU, a $100 upgrade on its own. From there, 24GB of RAM is $200 and 32GB is $400. That's pricey, but it's not ridiculous given the price of RAM everywhere else these days.

Apple is now selling the 13-inch Air with a 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max. For $20 more, you can get either the 35W Dual USB-C port or a 70W USB-C charger.

The 15-inch MacBook Air now starts at $1,299 with the M5 chip and a 10-core GPU.

Bottom Line

The MacBook Air, despite its place as Apple's new middle child in the Mac laptop lineup, is still the best option for the majority of users, if they can afford it. You get a slim design, strong performance and battery life, a comfortable keyboard, an excellent haptic touchpad, and strong base specs at 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Much of Apple's premium competition is actually more expensive now. For example, the Dell XPS 14 starts at $1,349.99 (as of this writing, the price tends to fluctuate) with an Intel Core Ultra 5 325, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a 1920 x 1200 screen. That's more money for a lower resolution display and a less powerful chip. (The version we tested, with a Core Ultra 7 355, is up to $1,449.99). Getting Intel's top processors only goes up from there. But if you need to use Windows, you may need to pony up or find alternatives to get a premium ultrabook in your price range.

Meanwhile, Apple's MacBook Neo may be an alternative for some, but if you're doing serious multitasking, the 16GB of memory in the MacBook Air will be a noticeable difference, and you'll also get better speakers, MagSafe charging, an excellent haptic touchpad, a larger, higher-resolution display, better webcam, keyboard backlighting, and a faster chip, to boot. You get a lot extra with the Air, if you can afford it.

That leaves the MacBook Air as a great value in the premium ultraportable space. While I would love to see Apple start bringing its fancier screens and other Pro features down to the Air, this is a laptop that most people can get by on, presuming they're not doing intensive workloads that need constant cooling and heavy graphics prowess. For just $1,100, you can get a lot of Mac. That's getting harder and harder for other companies to say about their PCs, as the RAM and storage crisis continues to drive up prices.

TechTuber Epictronics has shared a video documenting his attempts to fix a vintage 20-inch Trinitron CRT monitor suffering from cataracts by injecting UV resin. Spoiler alert: the exploration of a syringe, heat, UV, and patience-requiring method of fixing this old Apple-branded Sony monitor ended up being “a mega-successful repair.” Indeed, under normal lighting/magnification, as evidenced by before and after photos, the unsightly air pockets appear to have vanished.

We’d have to agree that spending time fixing a sample of the legendary Apple GDM‑20E01 is time well spent. Introduced in the mid-1990s, this was a premium, expansive, color display from the era, coveted by creatives (and others who saw it). It used a Sony Trinitron tube and supported resolutions up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels.

This particular sample has maybe had a harder life than some. The TechTuber says it was actually “trash-picked… very smelly” and filled with spiders when he acquired it. Picking it out of a dumpster could put your back out, though. The GDM‑20E01 tips the scales at approximately 66 pounds (30kg).

“A very nasty cataract issue.”

Epictronics notes that cataracts are a much more prevalent issue in monitors from the 70s, but we’ve already mentioned that Epictronics’ sample was rescued from the trash. This monitor, and many like it, have a thin layer of glass bonded to the CRT tube face. Unfortunately, the protective layer can delaminate over time, which isn’t good for the viewer, with lighter patches often creeping in from the edges, progressing after numerous heat and cold cycles, aging, and weathering take their toll on the bonding adhesive.

Pondering over the scale of the problem for this GDM‑20E01, Epictronics says that while a traditional fix might involve using a heat gun to completely remove the front laminated layer, it is a “risky process than can go wrong, horribly wrong.” So, for this Trinitron, with cataracts still only creeping in from the sides, a less dramatic fix was going to be tested. The TechTuber decided to use a syringe plus clear UV-curable resin to determine if the unsightly air gaps could be flooded. Anyways, Epictronics insisted that this smaller-scale fix won’t hinder a fuller solution at a later date.

After finishing injecting the major air-gap/bubble-affected region in the video and replacing the screen bezel, the TechTuber said, “That was a mega-successful repair.” From start to finish, his technique progressed, settling on a periodic syringe needle-heating technique so the resin flowed readily into the gaps. Magnified close-ups show the cured resin still contained very small air bubbles, but they weren’t observable by the naked eye from a normal sitting distance. The image gallery showing before and after pics pretty much confirms the success of the CRT fixing project.

After the monitor section, Epictronics shifted his attention to the restoration of a contemporaneous Macintosh PowerPC 6100 base unit. The computer had several problems, like a faulty optical drive, among its issues. A DOS compatibility card with a 486 DX2-66 processor was also lined up to expand the capabilities of the pioneering PowerPC architecture machine.

Warning: CRT electronics can remain dangerous, even after the device has been powered off for some time.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the Apple Mac had its best launch week ever for new customers, and if you check out a MacBook Neo at the Apple Store right now, the website says it will ship in about two to three weeks. It seems that the affordable MacBook is on its way to becoming a massive hit for Apple, especially at a time when rising RAM and SSD costs are killing the entry-level PC market.

Cupertino officially announced the MacBook Neo on March 4, 2026, with deliveries beginning on March 11. The laptop had its first full week on sale by March 18, with Cook saying on X, “Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers. We love seeing the enthusiasm!” While Apple hasn’t released official sales figures, it seems that the company is seeing much more demand than anticipated for the affordable device. But unlike the OpenClaw-driven shortage of high-performance Macs and MacBooks, demand for the Neo seems to be coming from new customers switching from Windows to macOS.

Many enthusiasts snubbed the MacBook Neo because it’s lacking in specs — especially its A18 Pro SoC and measly 8GB of Unified Memory. But because this device is designed for students and casual users (and priced accordingly), it does not really need that much performance. Instead, Apple focused on what the average consumer likely wants: a good experience for day-to-day tasks, such as media consumption and basic productivity, and an excellent build that does not feel cheap. And despite its apparent lack of power, the MacBook Neo has been proven to run Cyberpunk 2077 at over 30 FPS.

Asus co-CEO S.Y. Hsu said that it was a shock to the entire PC market, especially as many manufacturers didn’t think Apple would launch such an affordable device. Still, he compared the Neo to a tablet, calling it a content-consumption device.

This would make the MacBook Neo a major threat to Microsoft’s dominance in the sub-$600 laptop market, especially since it fits the budget of many looking for an entry-level device. Furthermore, Apple’s education pricing offers a $100 discount on the laptop, bringing the price to less than $500 and making it attractive to many students and their parents.

Windows still offers a few advantages that Apple cannot match. But as the MacBook becomes more popular and gains market share over Microsoft, that would entice more developers to build for macOS, making it an attractive alternative, especially if you already have an iPhone. PC manufacturers need to step up their game and offer an alternative that could match the MacBook Neo in both price and quality if they want to compete against Apple, but the ongoing memory and storage chip shortage will certainly make that challenge.

Earlier this month, Apple released the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop that impressed reviewers (myself included) with surprisingly good quality for the price.

"Yes, the MacBook Neo is $599. But it rarely feels like it," I wrote in my review. "Apple invested in a premium aluminium chassis, a bright, good-quality screen, and a decent keyboard and mouse. Putting performance aside, those are the parts of a computer that most people care the most about."

I stand by those words, but there are, of course, people who put performance above all else, even at $599. And to those people, I have good news: You can get a Windows PC!

Some table stakes here: We haven't been able to review a ton of budget Windows PCs. In fact, the companies that make them don't usually like to make them available for loans. But we've done a bit of internet window shopping, and using some comparisons from our own data and online, we can more closely evaluate the performance gains that some Windows laptops offer at this price point.

The competition

I browsed multiple big box stores and shops from laptop manufacturers. One quick theme came up: Many laptop deals in this price range are sold by third-party sellers, some of which don't seem so reputable.

I stuck with laptops that are being sold directly from the vendor's store. The MacBook Neo, sold at many stores, will come with a 1-year warranty and support. So these systems had to, also. That weeded out a surprising number of candidates.

To get good pricing, though, some of this had to rely on sales. For example, HP sells a 14-inch laptop on its website with a $499.99 MSRP with a last-gen Intel N150, a 1366 x 768 display topping at 250 nits, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, and Windows 11 Home in S Mode. At least it has a Copilot key? Shoppers should be aware that they can do better if they shop around.

I chose three major competitors:

• Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x, a Snapdragon laptop with the latest standards, but a two-year old CPU. Sound familiar?
• Asus Vivobook Go 15, a $499 notebook, matching the MacBook Neo's education price.
• Dell 14 Plus, on sale exclusively for $649 at Dell.com, shows what an extra $50 can get you on Windows if you catch the right sale.

Here they are in a table to compare the major specs:

Something for everyone

If you want a premium experience, the MacBook Neo will win. Of these systems, the Neo is the only one with a completely aluminum body. Others, like the IdeaPad and the Dell 16 Plus, have aluminum top covers but are otherwise made of plastic. Apple’s is also the lightest machine of the bunch, at 2.7 pounds, while the IdeaPad and Asus are both more than 3.5 pounds.

The big question most people will want to know is about system memory. The Qualcomm-based IdeaPad and the Dell 16 Plus both come with 16GB, while the Asus sticks with 8GB, like the Neo. All of those are soldered (in Dell's case, it's also on-package because it uses Intel's Lunar Lake architecture).

Apple's A18 Pro, a six-core processor with 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro in 2024. The Intel Core Ultra 5 226V in the Dell, an 8-core processor, was released the same year. Months later, in January 2025, the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X (X1-26-100), the least-powerful chip in this laptop lineup, dropped. The Vivobook Go boasts the oldest processor; the AMD Ryzen 5 7520U launched in 2022 with 4 cores on a 6nm process (that platform launched in 2023).

I can tell you from experience that the MacBook Neo's display is significantly better than what you typically see in big box stores at the $599 price point. If you get this Dell 16 Plus while on sale, you can get a 2560 x 1600 screen, which is slightly higher in resolution. But Dell is only promising 300 nits of brightness; we measured the Neo at 452.6 nits. Asus promises just 250 nits of brightness. On paper, the Neo sure sounds better – and it looks quite good in person. The other laptops offer bog-standard 1080p displays, which I would've called good enough for the price until now.

Both Apple and Dell have 1080p webcams. Those vary a ton in quality. I know Apple's is great, I can't speak for Dell's. When I showed Apple's to managing editor Matt Safford, he said, "I'm pretty sure that's the best-looking 1080p [laptop] webcam I've ever seen." The other two have 720p webcams, but hey, at least they have privacy shutters.

All of Apple's competition has larger batteries, though that isn't everything in battery life. In our MacBook Neo review, the Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X Plus and a 50 WHr battery outperformed the Neo, so it's possible that the IdeaPad, with a lower-power chip and a 60 Whr battery, and a lower-resolution, likely dimmer, lower screen would go even longer.

Apple's laptop also comes with a 20W USB-C charger. You could use a faster one, but if we're going based on what you get in the box, that's measly. The IdeaPad and Dell come with 65W chargers, while the Vivobook comes with a 45W charger.

One of the biggest issues I had with the MacBook Neo was the lack of backlit keys. Lenovo has backlit keys on the IdeaPad, as does Dell on the 14 Plus. But Asus' Vivobook also has darkened keys.

There’s no doubt that Apple's competitors offer more ports, including mixes of USB-A and USB-C, SD card readers, and even a Thunderbolt 4 port on that Dell. Many of the USB ports are 5GBps, making them slower than the fastest port on the Mac. But if variety trumps speed, then the PC is your friend here.

Single and multi-core performance

The main reason these systems weren't compared in our Neo review was that we didn't have scores in our benchmark database. Just to get a sense of performance, though, we're comparing our Geekbench 6 scores for the MacBook Neo to what we're seeing in the Geekbench database for others. It's not ideal, but it's what we've got to work with.

In this comparison, we see that Apple's Neo with A18 Pro still maintains a strong lead in single-core performance, where most Neo owners are likely to spend most of their time browsing the web, writing documents, working on spreadsheets, watching videos or movies, or doing other basic tasks. That being said, if you do switch into multi-core performance, both the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1-26-100 and Intel Core Ultra 5 226V outdid the Neo. Given the IdeaPad and Dell Plus housing those laptops also have 16GB of RAM as configured, they're more able to run multi-core tasks well in the first place.

Geekbench is great for emulating short, bursty workloads — the kind you're likely to run on a budget laptop. But this may not be illustrative of how these systems perform over a longer duration of time. And of course, a lot depends on what you actually do on your laptop.

What about education pricing?

Apple shaves $100 off the MacBook Neo for education pricing, bringing it down to $499, the same price as the Asus Vivobook. When you compare this head-to-head with the Vivobook on paper, the Neo wins every time, with the Vivobook’s bigger battery. (A larger battery doesn't inherently mean better battery life, though).

That being said, there is one important note to think about: software. While many students will likely be able to get along just fine with macOS, if you're in a specialized high school program or college major that uses software that only runs on Windows, you'll need a PC. If that's the case, leaning towards x86, like that Intel Lunar Lake chip in the Dell, is probably a smart choice; Qualcomm still has some work to do on app compatibility.

But if you're doing most work in the browser, Microsoft Office, or other software available on both platforms, the Mac's price will be extremely enticing here. The best Windows competitors are a bit more expensive.

A new breed of competition?

In general, when I review systems, I review everything about the system, as a full package. And for people doing basic tasks, I maintain that the MacBook Neo is a great value.

That being said, it does have limits. Those who need multi-core performance, more RAM, and more ports (and more properly-labeled ports, at that) do have options in this price range. You just have to give up something else, like build quality and/or a bright screen. That's how cheap laptops tend to work. But on single-core workloads, build quality, and when it comes to the displays, you really do have to hand it to Apple.

In Asus' most recent earnings call, co-CEO S.Y. Hsu said that the MacBook Neo was "certainly a shock to the entire market,” before turning around and saying it was mostly a content consumption device with just 8GB of RAM that you can't upgrade. I would tell him to also look at the Vivobook his company sells.

But that shock will hopefully lay the foundation for better competition from Windows OEMs at lower prices. It will be difficult during this RAM crisis, but raising the bar for budget notebooks across the ecosystem would really be great for everyone, no matter what operating system they prefer. And frankly, Apple's competitors better be ready to answer the MacBook Neo with something that feels as complete as the Neo does, or they'll risk looking out of touch. There are plenty of people who prefer a Windows PC to a Mac, but it's not like Microsoft has been earning fans with its OS lately. There's work to do.

IDC on Thursday sharply slashed its expectations for the PC and tablet markets, citing memory shortages, rising prices for 3D NAND, DRAM, and other components, and intensifying supply chain disruptions amid the AI sector boom. While unit shipments are expected to decline significantly year-over-year, higher average selling prices (ASPs) are projected to push total market value slightly upward.

The firm now expects global PC shipments to drop 11.3% in 2026 compared to 2025, a steep revision from the -2.4% decline projected in November 2025 and -8.9% in January 2026. In absolute numbers, this means PC sales will decline by 32.17 million units, from 284.7 million in 2025 to 252.53 million in 2026. To put the 32.17 million PC number into context: Apple shipped 25.6 million computers last year compared to 41.1 million systems for Dell.

Tablet volumes are also set to contract, and IDC forecasts shipments to fall 7.6% this year. Last year, vendors shipped 151.9 million tablets (up 5% compared to the previous year), with Apple leading the pack by a significant margin. If the new IDC forecast holds, then this year the market will decline by 11.54 million to 140.36 million systems. To put the number in context, Apple sold 17.1 million iPads in Q4 2025, while Samsung sold just 6.4 million units.

Even though unit shipments of PCs and tablets will decline, IDC expects market revenue to increase due to rising device prices. The firm estimates that the PC market will expand by 1.6% in value to $274 billion in 2026, while the tablet segment will grow by 3.9% to $66.8 billion.

"The era of bargain-priced PCs and tablets is behind us for now, as rising ASPs and component costs shift the market’s balance of power," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "Memory shortages will persist well into 2027. While we anticipate some easing of prices beginning in 2028, the market is unlikely to return to the pricing levels seen in 2025. Instead, we expect a new normal defined by structurally higher ASPs and a corresponding softening in long-term demand."

IDC noted that, at the time it compiled its forecast, the conflict in the Middle East had not yet escalated to its current level, adding another source of risk for global technology supply chains and economic development. Therefore, the analysts may revise their forecast downwards.

"The overall tech industry, as well as many others, continues to face uncontrollable headwinds that, when compounded, result in massive disruption," said Ryan Reith, group vice president, Devices and Consumer. "The lists of industry and geopolitical events that continue to grow is making decision‑making — and even survival in some sectors — nearly impossible. What has turned all of this from a million‑dollar question into a trillion‑dollar question is the complete uncertainty around when these pressures will subside."

The 2026 Apple MacBook lineup, announced earlier this month, went on sale just yesterday and is already seeing its first discount. If you’re planning to pick up one of the latest MacBook Air or MacBook Pro models, Amazon is offering a flat $50 discount across almost the entire lineup without requiring any coupons or memberships.

The M5-powered MacBook Air starts at $1,049.99 for the base model with 16GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage, down from $1,099.99. Similarly, the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip, which starts at $2,199.99, is currently available for $2,149.99, while the M5 Max model, originally priced at $3,599.99, is selling for $3,549.99.

• Check out the Apple MacBook Air 2026 deal on Amazon
• Check out the Apple MacBook Pro 2026 deal on Amazon

The new Apple MacBook Air comes with Apple’s latest M5 chip along with several key upgrades to performance, storage, and connectivity. The laptop now comes with 512GB of base storage, which is double compared to the previous generation’s 256GB, along with faster SSD speeds, which Apple says can deliver up to twice the read and write performance.

Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models feature 16GB of unified memory as standard, support up to 4TB of storage, and include Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. The overall design remains largely unchanged from previous models, and you can get the laptop in the same colors as last year, including sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver.

As for the refreshed 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, Apple now offers them with the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The new chips feature up to 18 CPU cores, including six new high-performance “super cores,” which Apple says can deliver up to 30% faster multi-threaded performance compared to the previous M4 generation.

The M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with 307 GB/s bandwidth, while the M5 Max increases this to 128GB and 614 GB/s. Graphics performance has also improved, with up to 40 GPU cores and around 35% faster ray-tracing performance. Apple is also offering faster storage with double the speeds, going up to 14.5 GB/s, with base storage now starting at 1TB for the M5 Pro models and 2TB for M5 Max. Other updates include a 12MP Center Stage webcam, brighter Liquid Retina XDR display, and Wi-Fi 7 support via Apple’s new N1 wireless chip.

While the $50 discount may not seem like much, it’s still a welcome deal considering these MacBooks were just launched and are still selling at full price on Apple’s official store. If you were already planning to buy one of the new models, grabbing it from Amazon lets you save a little without waiting for bigger discounts later in the year.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

A new series of Apple MacBooks have just launched, and are available to buy online now. You can purchase the budget-friendly MacBook Neo, the MacBook Air with M5, and the MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips from a number of tech retailers, including Amazon and Best Buy.

All three are available in a range of configurations. The MacBook Neo can be picked up for $599 on Amazon right now. The base model 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 is $1,099, and $1,249 for the 16-inch variant. Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro, in its various M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max options, is on sale for $2,699 for the M5 Pro model on Amazon, or as much as $4,399 on Amazon for the MacBook Pro with M5 Max.

These are three very different laptops on sale. If you're determined to get your hands on one after the March 11, 2026, launch date, here's where you'll want to look.

Where to buy MacBook Neo

Priced at just $599, the MacBook Neo is positioned as a budget Windows laptop replacement. As our MacBook Neo review already shows, it has the same polished, high-quality feel as its more expensive siblings. The compromise is power: the A18 Pro chip it uses was first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro, while its 8GB of RAM is already causing debate among Tom's Hardware forum readers.

The long and short of it is that this isn't really a laptop for enthusiasts, but it's a good option for students, casual users, and those on a tight budget.

Where to buy MacBook Air with M5

Next up is a new MacBook Air. This model comes with one of the newest Apple Silicon chips, the M5, along with a base storage bump up to 512GB, up to 4TB max. It's also getting Apple's N1 wireless, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support, with the 13-inch model starting at $1,099, and the 15-inch costing $1,299 from base.

The MacBook Air has been our best ultrabook choice for a while, and with a review imminent, we'll be able to confirm if that's the case with this newest model soon.

Where to buy MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

Finally, the MacBook Pro is getting a refresh, too. Like the Air, we're seeing M5 chips in this productivity-focused laptop, with the M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max offered on sale. Our MacBook Pro M5 Max review shows just how powerful these laptops can be, coupled with an 18-core CPU, 40-core CPU, and 128GB of unified memory in our review unit.

Fast, powerful, and pricy, the MacBook Pro with M5 Pro is on sale from $2,199, and the M5 Max from $2,499, although these can be considerably more expensive, depending on your config. Expect to see various pre-built configurations available at different retailers, depending on where you look.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Apple has a new laptop release on the very near horizon, and even though the new, smaller MacBook Neo is priced fairly, you can save even more if you preorder the new computer on Amazon ahead of Wednesday's official release date. The Amazon Spring Deal Days sale is in full swing, and one of those deals is a 5% (£29.03) saving on the MacBook Neo launch price of £599.99, making it just £569.97. This is for only two of the colour schemes, though, the Indigo and Blush coloured MacBook Neo laptops.

• Grab this deal at Amazon

The new MacBook Neo uses the A18 Pro chip, previously used in Apple iPhones, and has six cores, a single-core clock speed of up to 4.0 GHz, and up to 2.4 GHz in multi-core use case scenarios. Other features include a gorgeous 13-inch liquid retina display, 8GB of unified memory, 256GB of SSD storage, and a 1080p webcam.

We reviewed the Apple MacBook Neo and were surprised by its premium feel and looks in comparison to the much more expensive MacBooks. The chassis of the Neo is premium, and the 13-inch liquid retina display is bright, with vivid colours. The touchpad is clickable anywhere on the pad, and overall, it's the most affordable MacBook laptop ever made.

Some things we weren't fans of, however, were the lack of backlighting on the keyboard, which made it harder to see keys in a darkened environment, and the lack of functionality labeling on the USB-C ports. The ports are quite different in the physical tasks they could handle. Apple's operating does notify you if you plug something like a small portable monitor into the USB-C port that doesn't support DisplayPort functionality, but it's a bit of a clunky design choice for Apple.

This is an interesting change for Apple and awesome if you're looking for an eBook-style laptop with a premium feel and build quality for a good price. The fact that you can already make a saving before the MacBook is even released is amazing and definitely something you should jump on if this is a product you're interested in. It's not a gaming laptop, and wouldn't be that effective as a high-productivity software machine, but for general internet activity and work/study use, it's a very enticing bit of kit.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best Amazon UK Spring Deals Days tech sales 2026

Apple's Macs have typically been viewed as pricey, premium devices. While Apple clearly can't ditch its penchant for a high-quality machine, it can make them relatively affordable. With the introduction of the MacBook Neo, starting (and tested) at $599, Apple has made a laptop for most people at a price that is shockingly affordable for the platform. And considering the cost of competing PCs are, in many cases, going up thanks to RAM and storage demands from AI hyperscalers, it’s refreshing to see a major company launch a product at a new low price.

And affordable doesn't mean cheap. The MacBook Neo has the quality aluminum chassis you would expect from any other Mac, along with a bright, clear display. It certainly doesn't feel like it's a bargain bin system.

Apple has made some compromises, though. The two USB-C ports are slower than what many others offer these days, and the keyboard isn't backlit. But if you can live with those cuts, Apple has delivered a surprisingly capable machine that could be one of the best ultrabooks at this mass-market price.

Design of the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo sure doesn't look or feel like a budget laptop; it's like a magic trick.

The aluminum body does a lot of the lifting here. As soon as you touch a Neo and lift the lid up with one finger, it feels like a premium machine. This doesn't feel less than — it's the real deal. The four colors are fun (I'm fond of the indigo, myself), but I’d still like to see Apple bring colors like they did to the iMac to the Neo; I appreciate that Apple went bold with the yellow-green citrus on our review unit, but I would have preferred a more pure yellow or green. This shade is lost somewhere between a tennis ball and a highlighter. Apple color-matches accents and folders in macOS, so the folders were a light green, too. It's a nice touch if you do like the color you got.

You still get rounded edges and flat sides like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The Apple logo is embossed onto the lid in a tone-on-tone style, rather than reflective like on the more expensive laptops.

The premium feel matters a lot. When I step into a retail store, I'm used to seeing cheap laptops that are made of plastic. The ones that do use metal are often covered in stickers, and often use generations-old components. Apple making the Neo feel like the rest of its lineup in that one respect makes you feel like you aren't cheaping out. Instead, you're getting something built solid that happens to be relatively affordable.

With the lid open, you start to notice some of the bigger differences. The bezel around the 13-inch display is thicker than on the Air or Pro, but acceptable for a device of this price in the market today. In fact, there's one gift in the bezel: Apple can fit the webcam in it without a notch.

The keyboard has a hue to it, too, with color-matched keys, though they're a bit more subtle than the rest of the notebook. The touchpad isn't as sweepingly large, but this system also has a smaller footprint in some respects.

The MacBook Neo measures 11.71 x 8.12 x 0.5 inches and weighs 2.7 pounds. It has a smaller footprint than the 13-inch MacBook Air, but is 0.6 mm taller. They weigh the same amount. I don't think you'll be able to tell the difference between the two in a backpack.

All of the ports are on the left side of the Neo. That includes the 3.5 mm headphone jack and two USB-C ports: one USB 3 (10Gb/s, support for DisplayPort) and one USB 2 port. Neither port is labeled, which I think is a mistake. Even putting a little monitor icon for DisplayPort would be a functional enhancement, if not an aesthetic one.

While most people buying a $599 laptop will probably never plug into a monitor (and perhaps just make backups once in a while with Time Machine), you shouldn't have to guess.

Instead, Apple has put notifications into macOS. If you plug a monitor or a high-speed drive into the USB-C 2 port, the system will ask you to move it. It's clunky, and the fact that the ports don't "just work" is the least Apple thing about this entire laptop. (If you have a Thunderbolt accessory, you'll get a different notification, as the Neo doesn't support Thunderbolt like the Air and the Pro).

I get that this is the first computer with an A-series chip to feature two USB ports, and this likely required significant engineering work to get another USB port at all. But if you're not going to label your ports, they need to just work.

In general, a MacBook Neo owner will always be able to use one major accessory and charge the laptop, which will be enough for most people. I just think it could have been done more neatly.

MacBook Neo Specifications

Apple A18 Pro and 8GB of RAM

Apple is powering the MacBook Neo with its A18 Pro. This chip was first introduced in the iPhone 16 Pro. Reviewers have been saying for years that smartphone chips were overpowered — the A18 Pro, in a sense, proves them right.

The A18 Pro that Apple is using with the MacBook Neo features six CPU cores: two performance cores and four efficiency cores. There's a five-core GPU, which is down one core from the version of this chip used in 2024's flagship iPhone.

The system-on-a-chip also comes with 8GB of RAM. When Apple announced that, some hardware enthusiasts suggested that it wasn't enough. To them, I say this: the MacBook Neo isn't for you.

Would I like more RAM? Sure. But I know what RAM is. Most people use their laptops primarily to send emails, watch videos, do homework, write documents, create spreadsheets, or make purchases that feel too important to make on a phone. In my testing, the MacBook Neo lets you do all of that. It can be slightly slower booting up, downloading large files, or switching between tabs in heavy use, but you'd really only know if you compared it directly to Apple's M-series chips.

At $599, you won't find too many laptops with 16GB of RAM. Many that do will have other compromises. For the people in my life who would buy this kind of laptop, they'll get by for at least a few years with 8GB of RAM, assuming local AI doesn't become some sort of mainstream hobby. If you know you need the RAM, you know to shop elsewhere.

Is more RAM better? Sure. But most people don't know what RAM is, and those who care are willing to spend more money on a more powerful device. The vast majority of the market for a $599 laptop will browse 14 Safari tabs, shop on Amazon, iMessage their friends, write their English paper, and binge-watch The Pitt in peace. If you're looking for more RAM and don't want Apple's latest M-series processor, you can still go look for deals on old stock on M2 and M3 MacBook Airs. Good luck finding one new at this price, and if it's used, you won't have your warranty or as many years of support.

Time will tell how many macOS updates this laptop gets, though Apple has a pretty good track record there. But in the immediate sense, this feels like a totally usable Mac, and frankly, one that I could get by with more often than I care to admit as an enthusiast.

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Neo

OK, you just read all that and you're still here. That means you want to see numbers. Time for some benchmarks. Here, we're comparing the Neo to an M3 MacBook Air — an older one some customers may be considering to try to get a discount right now — as well as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13, an $899 laptop using the mid-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 chip with 8 CPU cores.

On Geekbench 6, the Neo notched a single-core score of 3,535, with the A18 Pro surpassing both the M3 (3,082) and the Snapdragon X Plus (2,486). Single-core is where I expect most Neo users will spend most of their time, doing simple tasks like browsing the web and writing up documents.

On the multi-core test, the Neo and the A18 Pro's six CPU cores came in last place with a score of 8,920. The Surface Laptop 13 hit 11,321 (with an 8-core chip) while the M3 MacBook Air won at 12,087 (the M3 was also an 8-core chip). At least part of why those chips won is because they have more cores in general, and the M3 in particular had more performance cores. Still, it also suggests those are better systems for slightly heavier lifting.

For example, on Handbrake, in which we have laptops transcode a 4K video to 1080p, the Neo faltered, taking 9 minutes and 57 seconds to complete the task. The more expensive Surface Laptop 13 completed the task in under 5 minutes.

The Neo did about as expected for a budget laptop on our 25GB file transfer test, achieving a rate of 654.82 MBps. That's only slightly slower than the Surface, but the MacBook Air was far much faster at 1,167.29 MBps.

I also ran the Xcode benchmark, which simulates compiling a large codebase using the suite of Apple developer tools. It took 6 minutes and 47 seconds on the MacBook Neo, far more than other Macs. That being said, you could do this work, at least if you're extremely patient.

On more premium laptops, we often run a Cinebench 2026 stress test. That's a difficult rendering benchmark. In this case, I ran just one run, with a score of 1,439. More telling was that the run took 14 minutes and 2 seconds. Case in point, this system just isn't designed for that kind of workload. (And like in most other systems, scores would likely drop from there,)

While Apple doesn't allow access to its chips' clock speeds, Cinebench estimates that the A18 Pro has a single-core clock speed of up to 4.0 GHz on single-core tasks and 2.4 GHz for multi-core.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Neo

It would be far-fetched to call the MacBook Neo a gaming laptop in a traditional sense. While Apple has had a few major releases on iPhone, the A18 Pro isn't designed for high-end Mac gaming like its M-series. There's a reason the one game shown on the Neo page on Apple's website is Oceanhorn 3, an Apple Arcade game that can also be played on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV.

That being said, light gaming is possible.

And the Neo beat the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus (8-core) in the Surface Laptop 13 in benchmarks. On 3DMark Steel Nomad, the Neo earned a score of 369, beating the Surface's 229 points.

On the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, using the "For this Mac" settings, we saw the Neo play at 32.59 frames per second at a resolution of 1,637 x 1,024, which it defaulted to. That preset, a mix of low and medium settings, also included MetalFX dynamic resolution scaling. There are settings that can play games, though playing below 1080p isn't ideal. And this also suggests that there were a number of frames below 30 FPS.

I also played a bit of Stray, a lovely, Mac-native game. But even that much lighter game needed to be turned down to its lowest settings at the low resolution of 1,637 x 1,024 with the game's built-in upscaling to get between 30 and 40 FPS at the game's opening sequence, but it was as low as 20 FPS in other scenes.

Can you game on this system? Yes. Should you probably stick to Apple Arcade games that also work on iPhones? Also yes. Apple isn't selling this as a gaming system. It isn't one. It has fewer graphics cores than the iPhone that originally housed this chip. At this price, that's fine.

Display on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo's 13-inch screen, at 2,408 x 1,506, is surprisingly high-resolution for this price point. You'd usually find a 1080p or 1280p screen, depending on aspect ratio, but here you get something a bit closer to 1440p (give or take some pixels on either end). The display has a 60 Hz refresh rate, which makes sense at this price.

The LED, IPS screen is the same type of panel used on the MacBook Air, and I think it was a good investment to spend money on the screen. It is, however, missing True Tone, the feature that uses an ambient light sensor (which this laptop lacks) to adjust the screen's color temperature to your environment.

I was impressed while watching a trailer for The Odyssey using the MacBook Neo. The subtleties of an orange glow on Matt Damon's face from a light on his boat in an otherwise deep blue sea aren't as striking on even basic 1080p screens that come with more expensive notebooks. Viewing angles might be a little dimmer than on some MacBook Airs I used, but if you're looking head on, you're great.

On our colorimeter, the Neo's screen covered 110.9% of the sRGB color volume space and 78.8% of DCI-P3 (though the system itself doesn't support the DCI-P3 color space). The Neo measured in at 452.6 nits of brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Neo

Apple's keyboard on the MacBook Neo is comfortable. It is not, however, backlit. The keys on my Citrus unit are ever so slightly yellowed to create some contrast, though I wouldn't mind darker legends.

For touch typists like me, backlighting isn't really a problem. I know where keys are, I know them by feel, I don't have to look (though I will admit to occasionally getting mixed up on the function row). But lots of people look at keys, and those people do sometimes use computers in the dark. I definitely did as a student while my roommate tried to get some shuteye. My mother likes to have backlit keys at night because she just can't see them otherwise. Point being, people in all of the key demographics could benefit here.

The keyboard itself is good. The 1 millimeter of travel is similar to the keyboard on the MacBook Air. I found that it feels slightly stiffer than Apple's other laptops, though not in a way that tired me. (My guess here is that the Neo's keycaps are using a different kind of plastic for the keycaps). I was still able to speed along and hit 116 words per minute and 98% accuracy on the monkeytype typing test, which is close to my best.

If you get the base model Neo, the top right key is a lock button. On the 512GB version, you get Touch ID, which I think is worth spending the extra $100 just for logging in and paying for things quickly and more easily over the lifetime of a device. Schools using cloud services may decide TouchID isn't worth that bump.

The touchpad on the MacBook Neo is mechanical, rather than the luxurious "Force Touch" haptic touchpads on the MacBook Air and Pro. But Apple's touchpad, unlike many budget machines, lets you click anywhere on the touchpad. All macOS Tahoe's gestures worked flawlessly for me, and the click is comfortable. The ability to click at the top of the touchpad and not be halted by hinge placement really makes this touchpad easy to use.

Audio on the MacBook Neo

Apple has dual speakers on the MacBook Neo, with one on each side of the laptop.

On the one hand, these sound better than the speakers on most budget Windows laptops, and even on some high-end ones. On the other, they're still largely just fine.

Brandi Carlile's "Church & State" delivered clear vocals and guitars, but the song's bass riff (which really stands out among Carlile's music), sounded flat. The speakers could fill the room at max volume, but quieter listening may be a more personal experience.

I felt the speakers, which are located just under the keyboard deck, vibrating with my hands on the wrist rest, particularly at the highest volumes. It happened across all sorts of music, from alt rock (Cannons' "Starlight") to Americana (Noah Kahan's "The Great Divide"), so I can't blame Carlile's bass line. It happens on a lot of competing laptops — even some premium Windows notebooks, but it's still an engineering challenge I would like to see Apple tackle in future revisions of the notebook.

The 3.5 mm headphone jack doesn't have support for high-impedance headphones like the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, but I'm not sure someone using a $599 laptop is also jumping to use studio-grade headphones.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Neo

There's one big choice when it comes to configuring the MacBook Neo: 256GB or 512GB of storage. Think carefully, because you can't change it later.

Sure, you can take the bottom of the laptop off by removing the eight pentalobe screws. And while Apple has added more screws to components like the battery for schools to service, you can't upgrade the SSD, which is soldered to the board. (The 8GB of RAM is packaged with the processor.)

But if you need a repair, chances are you'll be heading to the local Apple Store.

Battery Life on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook's battery life will last quite awhile until you need to charge it, but I wouldn't quite call it all-day battery life. It's good for the price, but the 36.5 WHr battery can only do so much.

On our battery test, which involves streaming video, browsing the web, and running light OpenGL graphics test with the screen at 150 nits, the MacBook Neo ran for 13 hours and 28 minutes.

That's great for $599. The Surface Laptop ran for an impressive 17:14, though that has the advantage of a lower-resolution, 1080p display. Microsoft also uses a larger, 50 WHr battery, though that system starts at $899.

The 13-inch M3-based MacBook Air from 2024 ran for 15 hours and 13 minutes when we tested it.

Apple didn't include fast-charging technology in the MacBook Neo. After fully discharging the laptop, it charged to 22% after half an hour with the included 20-watt charger. Following another 30 minutes, the charge doubled exactly, to 44%.

Heat on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo stays remarkably cool. Even under a stressful test that most Neo users won't even consider — running Cinebench, a rendering test — the fanless system stayed comfortable to the touch.

The keyboard measured in at 93 degrees Fahrenheit, while the touchpad was a cooler 82 F. The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop measured 96 F.

Tunabelly Software's TG Pro, which measures Mac temperatures, couldn't detect the A18 Pro during our testing. But the system average across other internal sensors measured 58.58 degrees Celsius inside the system.

Webcam on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo hails the return of the 1080p camera, bringing back the "FaceTime HD" brand from the M1 era.

Given that 1080p webcams are a bit of a standard even among some high-end Windows PCs, it's hard to ding Apple for the choice here. Apple did ditch some other camera-focused features, like Desk View and Center Stage (the latter which some video chatting apps may offer in software).

And it's a good camera! Frankly, I'm not sure I've seen a webcam on a laptop under $1,000 that looks this good before. It's color accurate, and in video calls you could make out details like individual hairs on my head and the speckled paint on our industrial-looking office ceiling.

Apple has also gotten rid of the green LED next to the camera to let you know that it's on. It was disconcerting at first, but macOS does have both camera and microphone indicators in the menu bar. But in full screen applications, the menu bar goes away, instead leaving a small green dot in the corner of the screen. I'd prefer to have the physical indicator, especially for younger kids getting their first laptops. But if I've gotten used to these status notifications being in software on my iPhone, perhaps I can get used to it here.

Software on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo comes with the latest version of macOS, Tahoe 26.3.1. It brings the "Liquid Glass" design language that iPhone or iPad users new to the Mac may already be used to. The use of translucent effects and a lot of icons in menus have been divisive among Mac diehards, though I suspect that it won't be as controversial among those coming from Windows, ChromeOS, or just having a phone.

The MacBook Neo has a bunch of pre-installed apps in the box, just like its more expensive siblings. These include the Safari web browser, Messages for texting and iMessage, FaceTime, a new Phone app, Notes, Reminders, Photos, Mail, Calendar, and service-based apps like Music, Apple TV, and News.

Most of this syncs with an iPhone, which will be great for first-time users. If you have an iPhone and a Neo, you can use iPhone Mirroring, one of my favorite features from the last few years, to use your phone from the computer.

There are some free workflow apps built into macOS, like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Many of the most common apps you may want, like Microsoft Office, are available in the App Store as native apps for Apple Silicon, though they're not included.

While macOS has a lot in the box, it doesn't feel bloated. I've used a lot of cheap Windows laptops, and the companies that make them often fill them with trialware to help make more money off of them. It's great to turn on an affordable system without needing to uninstall a whole bunch of junk I don't want.

MacBook Neo Configurations

Apple has kept the Neo's configuration options super simple.

For $599, you get the A18 Pro chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD. For $699, you get the exact same computer, except the storage jumps up to 512GB and you get Touch ID. The only other choice you have to make is color.

For individuals, I think spending the extra $100 is money well spent. The extra storage is great for photos, music, and documents, while Touch ID is so much faster than typing in a password.

But if you're a school buying these in bulk for classrooms and have students store assignments in cloud services, you don't need Touch ID. Considering you can save $100 with an educational discount, the $499 for schools or students looks pretty good.

The MacBook Neo comes with a 1-year warranty. For those who want to go the AppleCare+ route for extended protection, it's $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year (or you can add it to an Apple Care One plan for $19.99 per month for three devices).

Bottom Line

Yes, the MacBook Neo is $599. But it rarely feels like it. Apple invested in a premium aluminium chassis, a bright, good-quality screen, and a decent keyboard and mouse. Putting performance aside, those are the parts of a computer that most people care the most about. Add in about 13 hours of battery life, and you get a machine for most people doing the most common tasks, but in a package that feels like it's something special.

The colors, while nice, could be more vivid. My real issue with the laptop is that the ports aren't labeled, and that the hardware relies on macOS as a crutch to correct users. While I'm sure the lack of keyboard backlighting helped bring the cost down, it's the number one usability feature I would bring back to make the laptop more accessible in more situations.

For most people doing most things — web browsing, sending emails, writing papers, shopping, even light photo editing — the MacBook Neo will do just fine. I'm an enthusiast; I'd love to see more RAM. But plenty of people's simple needs will be met by the A18 Pro and its strong single-core performance.

And for those people, the Neo will look very attractive next to the many plastic machines with poor screens you get when you walk into a big-box store. Every other PC company making notebooks under $700 is officially on notice.

Update: March 10, 5:10. p.m. ET: We updated this review with an additional chart detailing display measurements on the MacBook Neo and its competitors.

Apple's MacBook Pro, in its current profile, is trusted among the best ultrabooks. This chassis has been around for a few years. But the company's M5 Max, including an 18-core CPU with Apple's fastest cores ever, as well as a 40-core GPU and 128GB of unified memory, feels fresh, new, and of the moment.

The huge amount of memory and a powerful GPU allow for a wide variety of workloads, including those who are dabbling in local AI.

And if you're not into AI, it's still good at everything else, assuming your software works on a Mac. It's strong for graphics work, video production, compiling code, and yes, all of the usual stuff you would do on a laptop. And it does it all with polish and finesse, including an industry-leading touchpad and the option for a stunning, glare-reducing nano-texture screen.

The system is staggeringly expensive at $5,849 as tested, but this is a tool you use for work, not a personal expense. For real Pros making their living on this machine, all of the speed may be worth it.

Design of the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

At this point, Apple's MacBook Pro design is familiar and well-worn. It's still functional, still pretty, and still focused more on the work you're doing than standing out.

The aluminum chassis, with flat surfaces and rounded corners, is minimalist, with Apple's tone-on-tone reflective Apple logo making the biggest statement on the machine.

With the lid open, you'll see the 14.2-inch screen surrounded by thin bezels, except for the notch around the webcam. Years in, I'm still vaguely annoyed by it, though even I will admit I've gotten largely used to it at this point.

The keyboard sits in a black well in the silver chassis, a signature of the MacBook Pro models that I still love to this day. Speaker grilles line each side, with a large touchpad underneath. It all sits on a sturdy base that feels incredibly premium.

The left side of the laptop houses the MagSafe charging port, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and the 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the right side, you'll find a full-sized SD card slot, another Thunderbolt 5 port, and an HDMI output.

The MacBook Pro measures in at 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.56 pounds with the M5 Max.

MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) Specifications

M5 Max

The M5 Max chip uses the Fusion Architecture, similar to what has previously been seen in Apple's M-series Ultra chips. The CPU and GPU are on separate dies, connected by a high-speed interconnect.

The 40-core GPU, paired with the 128GB of RAM, should be a powerful combo for video editing, VFX, and for local AI development. Because the M5 Max uses unified memory, most of that RAM can be directed straight to the GPU.

Both M5 Max variants have 18-core CPUs. Six of those are Apple's "super" cores, its fastest performance cores yet. The other 12 are "performance" cores, new cores (taking the old performance name - got it?) that can thread the needle between power and efficiency.

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

We're comparing the MacBook Pro to a suite of recent laptops. Without a ton of workstations in our database, we're comparing to recent consumer systems. The Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra may try to look like a Mac, but it pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H with 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 discrete laptop GPU. There's also the Asus ZenBook Duo (UX8407) with two screens running off of Intel's latest top laptop chip, the Core Ultra X9 388H with integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics and 32GB of memory. Lastly, the ultra-repairable Framework Laptop 16 puts AMD's Ryzen AI 7 350 and an RTX 5070 together, along with 16GB of RAM.

The M5 Max handled everything I threw at it. Photo editing workloads were a breeze. So were my experiments in Blender. Even my trials in LM Studio running open-source models like Google's Gemma 3 27B left plenty of Apple's 128GB of RAM open, with the system producing new tokens extremely quickly.

In benchmarks, the MacBook Pro with M5 Max devastated the competition.

On Geekbench 6, Apple's super cores were the fastest in single-core testing, with a score of 4,338. In multi-core, the super and performance cores reached 29,430, devastating the rest of the field. The next highest in both was the ZenBook Duo, with scores of 3,031 and 17,283, respectively.

Apple showed off in our file transfer test. It claims its SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation, and the results speak for themselves. The MacBook Pro completed our 25GB file transfer test at a rate of 3,835.38 MBps. The next fastest, at 1,724.69 MBps, was the Framework.

In our Handbrake video encoding test, the Mac transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 1 minute and 55 seconds. That’s nearly a minute-and-a-half faster than the next fastest, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, at 3:18.

To compare against other historical Mac chips, we run the Xcode Benchmark, which sees how fast a system compiles a large codebase. The MacBook Pro with M5 Max took 87 seconds, putting it on par with the last Max chip we have in our database, the M3 Max (85 seconds).

Our ten-run Cinebench 2026 stress test started at a score of 8,058 before immediately diving into the mid-7,000's as the heat picked up. The fans did get the score back up to 7,990 at run 5, but otherwise, scores were largely stable.

Because macOS doesn't provide access to clock speeds, we have to rely on other measures. Cinebench 2026 estimates that the M5 Max runs up to 4.6 GHz on a single core and 4.3 GHz multi-core.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The 40-core GPU, with access to much of the 128GB of unified memory, is a powerhouse.

When I played around with the intensive life simulation game InZoi, I followed one of my characters from home to a volleyball game on a pier, with the game typically running between 40 and 50 frames per second at 1920 x 1200 at the high preset before even using MetalFX. That's impressive for a game whose developer recommends desktop GPUs and adding Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR on a Windows gaming rig.

On 3DMark Steel Nomad, the MacBook Pro achieved a score of 3,865. The next best, the Framework Laptop 16 with a dedicated RTX 5070, notched a grade of 3,009.

On the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at ray tracing ultra, which we use for high-end gaming rigs, the MacBook Pro averaged 30.84 frames per second at 1920 x 1200. Using the "For this Mac" setting, it averaged 80.39 FPS at the same resolution, and 35.7 FPS at 3025 x 1890.

Another system we ran that test on at ray tracing ultra, the Framework Laptop 16 with an RTX 5070, reached 38 fps at 1920 x 1080.

Display on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

I've rhapsodized before about Apple's nano-texture displays for the MacBook Pro. I'm going to do it again.

Apple's 14.2-inch screen has a "Liquid Retina" resolution of 3024 x 1964, with a variable refresh rate that climbs up to 120 Hz with ProMotion. The Mini-LED backlighting isn't quite OLED, but it looks pretty great. It also comes with TrueTone enabled, which adjusts the image on your screen to ambient lighting with a color sensor (you may want to turn this off for photo or video editing for more exact colors).

That nano-texture panel is $150 extra and can only be configured on Apple's website. I don't know if I could get myself to cough up the money, but it's really beautiful. I work near a window both at the office and at home, and it does a great job of reducing (or effectively eliminating) reflections. If you're going to use your MacBook Pro for field work like video editing on the go, it may be worth it to you, and you should strongly think about the upgrade.

The screen also delivers with multimedia. When I watched the trailer for The Odyssey, I was impressed by deep black levels, as well as vivid colors like deep blues in an endless ocean and spots of green grass growing in dirt in a forest.

On our colorimeter and light meter, the MacBook Pro proved to be extremely bright, measuring in at 529.4 nits, significantly higher than the 455-nit Asus ZenBook Duo, an OLED screen that was the next most luminous on the list.

The Mac's screen covers 87% of DCI-P3 color volume and 122.9% of sRGB volume, largely in line with the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra and the ZenBook Duo.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

Apple's keyboards continue to be excellent to type on. The chiclet keys are comfortable, include a full-sized function row, and inverted-T arrow keys. It all makes sense.

Yes, some Windows laptops at this price point — especially gaming rigs — beat the MacBook Pro on travel. Some even offer mechanical keys. But I find that Apple's keyboard feels very comfortable, even after long typing sessions. Even the plastic on the keys feels good. On the monkeytype typing test, I reached 118 words per minute and 98% accuracy, which is about as good as I get.

Apple's Force Touch trackpads continue to be the best in the industry with smooth glass, comfortable haptics, and intuitive gesture support in macOS. It also helps that on the MacBook Pro, it's large and luxurious. Short of using an external mouse, I don't have any notes here.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (14-inch M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro's six-speaker sound system with force-cancelling woofers continues to amaze.

The Beaches' cover of "I Ran (So Far Away)" sounded excellent with clear vocals, energetic guitar, snappy drums, and a thumping bassline. It easily filled a photography studio in our office. The MacBook Pro line continues to offer the best speakers on a laptop, period.

If you use headphones for audio production (or just have a fancy pair), the MacBook Pro's 3.5 mm headphone jack supports high-impedance cans.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The common refrain with modern MacBooks is to think very carefully about configuring before you buy. While there are eight pentalobe screws on the bottom of the MacBook Pro's chassis, you can't actually upgrade major components yourself. The SoC and the SSD are soldered, so you can't replace them on your own. If you need a repair, your best bet is probably Apple's Genius Bar.

Upgrades are pricey (see the configurations section, below), though they don't seem as huge as they did before the RAM crisis hit.

Battery Life on the (14-inch, M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro can easily last you a day on a charge. The new Pro topped the charts on our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs OpenGL tests all at 150 nits of brightness. The system ran for 17 hours and 58 minutes, surpassing the next best in the field, the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, by more than 2 hours.The M5 Max system lasted only slightly less than the vanilla M5 version, which ran for 18:14.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

During our Cinebench stress test, I took skin temperature measurements to see how hot the system gets to the touch under a rigorous workload.

The hottest point was actually the center of the keyboard, reaching 116.5 degrees Fahrenheit. While it wasn't too hot to type on, the heat was noticeable.

The touchpad stayed cool at 86 F, while the hottest point on the bottom measured 103.5 F.

We used Tunabelly Software's TG Pro, which measures internal Mac temperatures, to measure the M5 Max. The chip averaged 83.59 C during the test.

Webcam on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

Housed in the MacBook Pro's notch, there's a 12MP webcam. You'll look great using it. It's sharp and can easily highlight every button on a shirt or hair on your head. It supports Center Stage, a feature in macOS that allows the camera to focus on you even as you move around.

The webcam also has "Desk View," which lets you show your desk or table on video calls, which is good for showing anything that might be on old-school paper. But it's always a bit distorted, and I rarely find myself using that feature, in part because of that.

Software on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro with M5 Max ships with macOS Tahoe (we tested with version 26.3.1). With that, it brings "Liquid Glass" a new design language (also found in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26) that makes heavy use of translucent effects, adds a ton of icons to menus, and makes a bunch of aesthetic choices that have been controversial among Mac diehards. We went into that more in our review of the Macbook Pro with M5.

But Tahoe also brings some great new features, including a huge update to Spotlight that adds tons of actions, a built-in clipboard history, and far more automations for shortcuts. That's on top of adding Live Activities from the iPhone to the Mac, as well as a phone app with call screening.

You get a bunch of pre-installed apps in the box. These include Safari, Messages, Maps, Apple TV (the app, which houses the service of the same name), Reminders, Notes, Passwords, FaceTime, Photos, and more. Some users of the MacBook Pro are prime candidates for Apple's new Creator Studio, a subscription competitor to the Adobe Suite (and, to some degree, Microsoft Office), including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Mainstage, Compressor, Motion, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The latter four still come with free versions preinstalled in macOS.

MacBook Pro (14-inch) Configurations

We tested the 14-inch MacBook Pro in an extremely expensive, $5,849 configuration designed for those who need the most performance and want the beautiful nano-texture display. With an M5 Max boasting 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage, along with the glare-reducing panel, this system is truly for those who are using their systems for work.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max starts at $3,599 with an 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 48GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. Upgrading to the 40-core GPU will cost you $300, and the nano-texture screen is $150.

The base M5 Max starts at 36GB of RAM, but our 40-core GPU variant starts at 48GB. From there, a bump to 64GB is $200 more, or the jump to 128GB is a whopping $1,000 more (but really, is that whopping in today's PC industry?). Storage starts at 2TB. A bump to 4TB is $600, while 8TB will cost you $1,800.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro also comes with Apple's M5 Pro, starting at $2,199, or the standard M5 (see our review) beginning at $1,699. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,699 with the M5 Pro and $3,899 with M5 Max.

Apple sells the 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 1-year warranty. Beyond that, AppleCare+, which covers repairs, battery replacement, and priority support, is $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year (or is available as part of AppleCare One for $19.99 per month, covering up to three products).

Bottom Line

If you need power for your job or hobbies, there's very little the MacBook Pro can't do. The super cores and performance cores on the M5 Max, combined with a 40-core GPU and 128GB of RAM, can handle anything from rendering to gaming to local AI, assuming you can afford that top configuration's high price tag.

The nano-texture screen continues to be an eye-popper, even if the mini-LED screen, while great, isn't quite OLED. The keyboard and trackpad are comfortable, and it's hard to argue with battery life that runs for almost 18 hours.

If you have a top-end M3 or M4 system, you may not need to upgrade yet. But professionals with older systems may see benefits with the faster SSDs and stronger cores.

The RAM and SSD pricing are still high — very high. But it's harder to criticize Apple than it used to be, with the memory and storage industry in a crisis. Now, everyone's charging high prices for upgrades.

But the 128GB configuration isn't one for a hobbyist. It's for someone making a living with this system. It puts the Pro in, well, Pro. If you need an attractive, portable powerhouse and your workloads can be performed on macOS, the MacBook Pro with M5 Max won't disappoint.

A Dutch designer has crafted a 10:1 scale working model of the classic wedge-shaped LEGO computer brick. Paul Staal from Watt IV, shares the idea, the magic, the build, and even a shopping list on his blog post about the project. Inside the scaled-up ‘brick’ is a punchy little Mac Mini M4. Other key components for this build include a 7-inch IPS display and about $20 of PLA filament (with access to a 3D printer required, of course).

Interestingly, the original LEGO brick computer (Part 3039p23), was introduced in 1979, half a decade before the original Apple Macintosh (1984). So the brick surely took design cues from the 1970s, rather than the 1980s, computers. Nevertheless, Staal ties these two iconic designs together in his timeline of influences behind “the upscaling” and creation of the new M2x2 workstation.

Staal shares the process behind the design of the M2x2. He explains it was a challenge to fit “a full M4 Mac Mini, a 7-inch display, and an array of peripherals into a form factor that remains true to the original brick.” Moreover, it is a 10:1 scale replica, but perseverance and attention to detail in Fusion 360 look to have paid off.

We also appreciate that the design’s two LEGO studs on top of the ‘brick’ are functional knobs. One can be turned for media control, like computer volume or track selection, the other includes a wireless charger for charging an Apple Watch or Airpods. “Every detail was considered, from the ‘pocket’ in the back that acts as a handle (a nod to the original Mac) to the fold-out ‘wings’ that manage the power cable with classic elegance,” explains the M2x2 maker.

While the M2x2 is a self-contained computer, no one in 2026 could put up with such a cramped 7-inch screen for long, for anything beyond the basics. Thus, Staal’s daily use of the system is with a spacious LG DualUp monitor, with the 7-inch built-in touch display used “mainly to show my Home Assistant dashboard.” It is also still useful, beside him on the desk, offering front ports to quickly charge devices like his keyboard or phone.

Staal kindly shares plenty of details about making the M2x2, and you can also find the 3D printer .STL files to download.

LEGO and computer tech often intertwine in surprising ways, and we have also seen commercially available computer accessories integrate features for LEGO fans.

Edit 3/8/2026 7:25am ET: Clarified the nature of the benchmark win in the title and moved the analysis of poor scaling to the second paragraph.

Apple's desktop and notebook processors traditionally lead the pack in single-thread workloads, as industry-leading single-thread performance has been the company's focus for a long time. However, Apple's M5 Max processors not only outperform rivals by a huge margin in single-thread workloads, but beat all of them — including the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX — in multi-thread workloads in the Geekbench 6 benchmark.

There is a major catch here as the Geekbench 6 multi-thread benchmark is a brief, bursty test intended to mimic common consumer tasks such as archive compression, PDF processing, and image editing. Its short runtime and bursty nature prevent it from fully stressing ultra-high-core-count processors like the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX.

Furthermore, many of the suite’s multi-threaded subtests scale efficiently only to roughly 8 – 32 threads, which leaves much of such CPUs' parallel capacity idle, but which creates an almost perfect environment for Apple's CPUs that feature a relatively modest number of cores, but which evolve noticeably in terms of per-core performance from one generation to another. Also, keep in mind that Geekbench 6 is a synthetic benchmark that reflects the potential of the tested hardware but may not reflect its performance in real-world applications.

Additionally, when it comes to GPU compute performance, not everything is that rosy for the M5 Max.

Single-thread and multi-thread champion

According to recent Geekbench 6 results, Apple's 18-core M5 Max not only beats its direct predecessor, the 16-core M4 Max, in single-thread (4,353 points) and multi-thread workloads (29,644 points), but also the 32-core M3 Ultra that is supposed to be Apple's unbeatable multi-thread machine.

Furthermore, Apple's new flagship CPU beats AMD's 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX in single-thread (which is not surprising) and multi-thread workloads in Geekbench 6. It should be noted that while most Threadripper Pro 9995WX CPUs score around 26,000 GB6 points in multi-thread workloads, there is one example when this processor hits 30,170 points, which is a bit ahead of M5 Max's 29,644 points.

Apple's M5 Max processor in its maximum configuration packs six 'super' performance (SP) cores featuring increased front-end bandwidth (i.e., wider decoder?), enhanced branch prediction, and a new cache hierarchy to deliver unbeatable single-thread performance as well as 12 new performance (P) cores designed to deliver power-efficient multithreaded performance in professional applications, up from 16 cores (12P + 4E cores) offered by the M4 Max. We do not know details about microarchitectures of Apple's 'super' performance and performance cores, though the 12% single-thread performance difference between M5 Max's SP and M4 Max's P cores is evident.

As for the memory subsystem, the M5 Max features up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X-9600 memory connected to the host via a 512-bit interface, offering 614 GB/s of bandwidth, up 12% from M4 Max (546 GB/s). For now, no workstation processor can match the memory bandwidth of M5 Max or M4 Max. Efficient cache and memory subsystems are crucial for single-thread performance, so this part of the M5 Max also played a significant role in its performance boost compared to the predecessor.

Not quite a GeForce RTX 5090

In addition to its revamped CPU subsystem, Apple's M5 Max also boasts a new GPU that is based on a PowerVR-derived microarchitecture developed by Apple. As it turns out, a big integrated GPU and plenty of memory bandwidth can deliver serious GPU compute oomph: the M5 Max scores 232,718 points on the GeekBench 6 GPU compute benchmark when using the Metal API. Apple's previous-generation M4 Max scores up to 204,453 points in the same tests. Evidently, the new GPU is better than the predecessor, but not that significantly.

When compared to non-Apple GPUs, the one inside the M5 Max easily beats the iGPU inside the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which scores 133,447 points when unconstrained by thermals. When it comes to discrete graphics cards, Apple's flagship iGPU is ahead of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 (207,061 points, Vulkan), but trails the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (253,890 points, Vulkan) and has no chance against the GeForce RTX 5090. Still, building an integrated GPU that delivers compute performance comparable to one of the best graphics cards is a breakthrough.

Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM upgrade option from the Mac Studio this week, capping the M3 Ultra configuration at 256GB, MacRumors reported on Thursday. At the same time, Apple raised the price of the 96GB-to-256GB upgrade from $1,600 to $2,000, and delivery estimates for 256GB configurations have slipped to May.

The Mac Studio starts at 36GB RAM, with upgrade tiers ranging from 48GB up to — until this week — 512GB. The 512GB option, which was exclusive to the M3 Ultra chip and previously cost $4,000, no longer appears on Apple's configuration page. Apple has not commented publicly on the change, but the company’s rationale will inevitably link back to the ongoing memory shortage, which has sent commodity prices to record highs and constrained supply across the industry.

TrendForce revised its Q1 2026 DRAM contract price forecast in February to a 90-95% quarter-over-quarter increase, up from an earlier estimate of 55-60%. Meanwhile, combined DRAM and SSD prices will surge 130% this year, according to a recent forecast published by Gartner, which will drive global PC shipments down 10.4%.

All this is happening because memory manufacturers have reallocated production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, the specialized memory stacked inside AI accelerators from Nvidia and others. HBM consumes roughly three times the wafer capacity of conventional DDR5, so every wafer diverted to AI accelerators removes three bits' worth of standard DRAM from the market. TrendForce does not expect meaningful relief before 2027 or 2028, when new fab capacity comes online.

Apple has generally fared better than most OEMs struggling with the memory shortage. The company is understood to have secured long-term DRAM supply agreements extending through Q1 2026, giving it more allocation certainty than Android manufacturers or PC vendors working on shorter procurement cycles, but CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged that the shortage will have a greater impact on Apple’s Q2 earnings.

The fact that the 512GB tier has disappeared regardless of this suggests that ultra-high-density memory is facing particular scarcity even for major buyers like Apple. MacRumors also noted that demand for high-memory Mac Studio configurations has increased as users look for machines capable of running large language models locally, which could be a contributing factor to the extended May shipping estimates on 256GB builds.

The timing of this also compounds an already awkward situation for Mac Studio buyers. The current lineup pairs the M4 Max with the older M3 Ultra, a cross-generation mismatch that came about because Apple skipped the M4 Ultra entirely, as the M4 Max lacks the UltraFusion connector needed to fuse two dies. Anyone configuring the top-end M3 Ultra model right now is paying a $4,000 premium for a chip Apple has already moved past.

Apple is also expected to release M5 Max and M5 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio later in 2026, though no release window has been confirmed. Whether the 512GB tier returns with that update will depend on whether DRAM supply conditions improve enough to make high-density memory available at scale, but that’s not looking likely.

You might have noticed that Apple unveiled a new M5 MacBook Air this week. While the performance of the new chip promises big things, new product launches are a great time to score a discount on older Apple gadgets that are famously pretty expensive. Case in point, Amazon is now selling the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM for just $1,299, its lowest-ever price according to price tracking.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

This portable number gets you the larger 15-inch display, along with the aforementioned 24GB of RAM, an upgrade worth $200 alone on the M4 lineup, made all the more sweet by catastrophic price increases on memory and computers in general. You'll also get 512GB of storage, up from the 256GB base storage on this model, and a choice of three of the four colors available.

Despite being supplanted by the newly unveiled M5 chip, the M4 is no slouch, and Apple silicon continues to offer some of the best bang for your buck in processing when it comes to battery life, efficiency, and performance. For college or work, this laptop will chew through pretty much any day-to-day task. In our battery test, the 15-inch M4 was good for over 15 hours of use browsing the web, streaming video, and running OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi. In the same test, it beat the Lunar Lake Yoga Slim 7i from Lenovo by over an hour.

The crucial question is: why would you choose this over the new M5 MacBook Air? Firstly, there's cost. This MacBook is $200 cheaper than the new M5 with the same specs. Apple has increased the base prices of the MacBook Air and the storage, so the value is harder to compare like-for-like, but the M4 is considerably cheaper even when you factor in that the M5's base storage is now 512GB.

The M4 chip and M5 chip both feature a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU. However, the newer M5 features Apple's new super cores, as well as six efficiency cores. Apple says that the M5 MacBook Air is 4x faster at performing AI tasks than this model on sale. Away from AI, however, the touted performance margins are much slimmer, just 1.9x for AI video enhancement, 1.5x for 3D rendering in Blender, and 1.5x image processing in Affinity. All of which is to say that the gap between M4 and M5 isn't seismic, and of course, these are Apple's claimed performance figures; the real-world gap is likely to be smaller still.

The M4 model does have a slower hard drive, too. However, there's also a lot of parity. Both have exactly the same Liquid Retina display, are the same size and weight, have the same camera for FaceTime and video calls, very similar audio capabilities, the same ports (two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C)), TouchID, and the same battery life rating from Apple. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 are upgrades on the M5, but the gap generally is pretty slim.

Whether you think the gap is worth $200 is up to you, but if not, this deal is a corker and unlikely to stick around for long.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Apple finally took the wraps off its long-rumored budget laptop. In simultaneous events in New York, London, and Shanghai, the company showed off the MacBook Neo, which runs on the Apple A18 Pro processor (2 performance cores, 6 efficiency cores, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine), previously used to run the iPhone 16 Pro.

With this cheaper machine, Apple is taking aim at Chromebook and low-end Windows users, as well as those who may have wanted a MacBook but felt the price was out of reach. This new system, while still made of aluminum, comes in a variety of colors. They’re the most vibrant colors on an Apple laptop since the iBook G3 in 1999.

The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408 x 1506 resolution (500 nits maximum brightness), side-firing speakers with Dolby Atmos support, a multi-touch trackpad, a 1080p webcam, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. There are two USB-C ports: one supports USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), while the other is USB 3.0 (up to 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support). Only one external monitor is supported.

It's a relatively light device, weighing just 2.7 pounds and measuring 0.5 inches thick. Apple says the MacBook Neo can last up to 16 hours on a single charge thanks to its 36.5 WHr battery.

Apple says that the MacBook Neo will start at $599 for the 256GB version and will be available in silver, indigo, blush, and citrus. The 512GB version will come with Touch ID and be priced at $699. Both versions ship with just 8GB of RAM and support Apple Intelligence, and there are no build-to-order options for additional RAM. So what you see is what you get.

Preorders go live today, and systems will ship on March 11.

We've already had some hands-on time with the MacBook Neo, and we must say, the aluminum chassis feels really nice — especially at this price point. The trackpad is Apple-typical smooth, but there is no haptic feedback like in more expensive MacBook models. In addition, the keyboard is not backlit, which we take for granted on today's laptops (although some features had to be left on the cutting-room floor to reach a starting price $500 below the new M5 MacBook Air).

The MacBook Neo is a surprise during the ongoing RAM shortage, with other laptop makers struggling to keep laptop prices under control. While many Chromebooks start lower than the Neo's $599 starting price point, there have been reports that disappearing margins could drive the cheap Windows laptop market into extinction by 2028.

This laptop could also serve as a gateway into Apple's greater ecosystem, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and, most importantly, subscription services like iCloud+ and Apple Creator Studio.

John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, said at the New York City experience that "life is better with a Mac," and that this computer would put it in the hands of more people. They may also become lifelong customers.

Updated March 4, 10:03 AM with context on the greater PC market and quote from John Ternus.

Apple has kicked off its second day of early 2026 product releases with two new chips, new MacBook Pros, and a new Liquid Retina XDR display. But starting things off, let’s discuss the latest additions to the powerful Apple Silicon family: the M5 Pro and the M5 Max.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max increase the maximum CPU core count to 18 (up from 14), but with a twist. Apple says that it’s now using six of its most performant cores ever, which it dubs “super cores.” 12 all-new performance cores join these super cores to handle sustained multitasking workloads. Together, Apple says that the new CPU core can deliver up to a 30 percent uplift in multi-threaded performance compared to M4 Pro and M4 Max.

The M5 Pro now supports up to 64GB of unified memory (up from 48GB on the M4 Pro), with a total bandwidth of 307 GBps. The M4 Max doubles both metrics, delivering support for up to 128GB of unified memory operating at 614 Gbps.

When it comes ot graphics, the M5 Pro now features 20 GPU cores, which the M5 Max features up to 40 cores. Each GPU core contains a neural accelerator, and, combined with higher memory bandwidth, Apple claims up to a 35 percent performance boost in ray-tracing apps compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Other notable features include a 16-core neural engine on both chips and support for Thunderbolt 5.

The new M5 Pro and M5 Max are found in Apple’s refreshed MacBook Pros, which are still available in 14-inch and 16-inch form factors. According to Apple, users will see up to a 4x improvement in AI performance compared to the previous generation, and up to an 8x uplift compared to first-generation Apple Silicon.

If that wasn’t enough, Apple has also enhanced the storage subsystem, delivering double the performance for the onboard SSDs (up to 14.5 GBps). In addition, M5 Pro systems will now come with 1TB of base storage, while M5 Max systems will start at 2TB. Apple has stuck with Wi-Fi 6E across several generations of MacBook Pro refreshes, but now it’s using its in-house N1 networking chip, which combines Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Other features include a 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View support, a Liquid Retina XDR display (1600 nits peak HDR brightness) that still includes a nano-texture option, and up to 24 hours of battery life.

The new 14- and 16-inch MacBooks will be available for pre-order starting tomorrow, March 4th. However, there are some price hikes to accompany the increased performance and base storage. The 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $2,199 (up from $1,999) with the M5 Pro, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $2,699 (up from $2,499). If you want to step into the M5 Max versions of those systems, you're looking at $3,599 and $3,899, respectively.

Apple announced today that it will begin producing the Mac Mini in Houston, Texas, later this year, marking the first time that the compact desktop has ever been manufactured in the United States.

Production will take place at a new factory on Apple’s existing Houston campus, which already assembles the company’s AI servers and will double the site’s overall footprint. The decision is part of Apple’s $600 billion U.S. manufacturing commitment, announced last year, which came following President Trump’s threats to levy a 25% tariff on Apple products made overseas.

"Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we're proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year,” CEO Tim Cook said in an Apple Newsroom announcement, which also states that AI server production at the Houston campus had already started ahead of schedule in 2025, with logic boards assembled onsite feeding Apple’s data centers across the country. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, COO Sabih Khan said that Apple “feels more confident” about long-term Mac Mini demand, describing it as more popular than the Mac Pro.

Some production in China and Vietnam will continue alongside the U.S. line, with the Houston facility focused on serving domestic demand as the assembly operation scales up. Apple currently manufactures thousands of Mac Minis per week globally, with roughly one million units sold annually worldwide, representing a fraction of the company’s iPhone volumes, meaning the Houston line represents a modest slice of the company’s overall manufacturing footprint even at full capacity. The Mac Mini currently starts at $599 and is powered by Apple’s M4 and M4 Pro chips.

Apple is also building a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center at the Houston campus, due to open later this year, offering hands-on training in Apple's production techniques to students, supplier employees, and other U.S. businesses.

In terms of chip supply, the numbers Apple released alongside the Houston announcement show us how aggressively the company has been assembling a domestic semiconductor supply chain. The company said it exceeded its own targets and sourced more than 20 billion U.S.-made chips from 24 factories across 12 states last year, with partners including TSMC, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments. Separately, Amkor broke ground on a $7 billion semiconductor advanced packaging and test facility in Peoria, Arizona, where Apple is expected to be the first and largest customer when it opens.

It’s worth noting that Apple does have a track record for domestic manufacturing. In 2019, Cook toured a Texas facility with Trump that was presented as a new manufacturing site, though the facility had been producing Apple computers since 2013. However, four years later, in 2023, MacRumors reported that the then-new Mac Pro featured a ‘Product of Thailand. Final assembly in the USA’ label which was not seen on previous models, with Apple providing no explanation for the change

Some Apple customers have recently been taken by surprise due to the order lead times on several Mac models with upgraded Unified Memory quotas, which could be largely driven by the immense popularity of OpenClaw, the locally-run open-source AI agent that’s taking the internet by storm and sending users scrambling for Macs to run the AI.

While you can still get base model units of the MacBook Air, iMac, M4 Mac mini, and other basic models on the same day, upgrading memory can now increase delivery wait times by up to three weeks.

However, going for the highest possible memory capacity on high-end models greatly increases your waiting time, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of Unified Memory taking up to five to six weeks to be delivered.

Alex Finn, founder and CEO of Creator Buddy, linked this shortage in his X post to demand driven by “the world’s first true AI agent" in reference to OpenClaw (previously Clawdbot/Moltbot).

While data centers are hungry for AI GPUs and some startups are using multi-gaming GPU setups to train AI models, they’re not ideal for personal agentic AI run locally. This is especially true if you use a huge 70-billion parameter model in FP16 for your agent, which would require around 140GB of memory just for weights, according to AI investor Ben Pouladian. That means that it wouldn’t fit inside a single RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, and even if you manage to connect five graphics cards for a total of 160GB of memory, you’re still bound by the PCIe bottleneck.

Apple’s Unified Memory architecture fixes that problem. Even though HBM is still way faster than the LPDDR used in Macs and MacBooks, the fact that all the processing units — CPU, GPU, and NPU — share the same memory means that they don’t have to deal with PCIe bottlenecks or require technologies similar to NVLink, which is typically only found on data center class graphics cards.

Because of this, more and more people who want to run their own local AI agent are purchasing high-memory Mac models. This isn’t limited to M3 Ultra Mac Studio units with 512GB of memory. Even Mac minis and MacBook Pros with upgraded memory now have a waiting time of two to three weeks.

We cannot definitively say that these delays are caused entirely by huge numbers of people buying these devices to run their own AI models, as Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that it’s chasing memory supply to meet high customer demand. However, additional pressure from the consumer side will definitely not help with the memory chip shortage that, as of the moment, is primarily driven by AI hyperscalers and institutional buyers.