Eshu Marneedi

Apple’s week of announcements shows the company at its best

Apple’s week of announcements was certainly an experience. Image: Apple.

Apple this week announced annual updates to many of its products, including the iPhone 17e, the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max, Studio Displays, the MacBook Air, and the iPad Air, while debuting a new budget-oriented Mac laptop. The updates are largely incremental, with new processors in the laptops and iPads, but the revamping of Apple’s display lineup and the addition of the new MacBook Neo — one of the cheapest Mac laptops in modern history at $600 — make this week extraordinarily consequential for Apple’s most budget-oriented and professional users. I’m largely pleased with this week’s products, and I have thoughts on many of them, so I’ve taken a few days to consolidate my opinions into one article.

MacBook Neo

When Apple does a week of press releases, as it often does in the post-Covid landscape of the company’s product announcements, I usually start with the least important updates to get them out of the way. This week is an exception because of the disparity between announcements. On one hand, the iPad Air was refreshed only with a new M5 processor, and on the other, Apple added an entirely new Mac laptop to its lineup. This is the first new Mac since 2022, with the introduction of the Mac Studio, and like its much more expensive sibling, the MacBook Neo wouldn’t have been possible without Apple silicon. I would go as far as to say the MacBook Neo is class-leading, transforming the budget laptop landscape overnight.

The premise is this: a $600 — or $500 for students and teachers — aluminum-encased Mac laptop that is surprisingly compelling. The machine has its trade-offs, which I’ll be sure to note, but it’s an irrefutably amazing value. The MacBook Neo has an A18 Pro processor with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, as well as a five-core graphics processing unit. The processor is not the newest iPhone-series chip, but it’s enough to run macOS competently, a testament to Apple’s class-leading chip design. It comes with 8 gigabytes of memory with no option for more, and 256 GB of storage, up to 512 GB. The display is notch-less and sRGB, and the computer has two standard USB Type-C ports.

These specifications aren’t impressive by Apple’s standards, but they are by comparison to Windows laptops. For one, the computer is made of a new unibody aluminum chassis that’s weighty and durable, unlike even mid-range Windows laptops, and it includes a competent processor that would put a low-end Intel one to shame in virtually every benchmark. Bluntly, it’s a $600 computer with very few compromises for its price. This is clearly how Apple sees this device: as a direct competitor to the pale reality of Chromebooks and low-end, Chinese-made Windows laptops that provide a subpar hardware and software experience. The MacBook Neo seems like the first product in its price range that doesn’t give off the vibe that it’ll be a pain to use. It looks like a Mac, runs like a Mac, and will probably perform like a Mac.

To illustrate how good a Mac this product is, the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro processor has a higher single-core Geekbench score than the $7,000 Mac Pro Apple sells today. And it clearly surpasses every single Intel MacBook Pro Apple sold only five years ago. This computer will easily run Safari and complex JavaScript-filled webpages, as well as native Mac apps like Pages and Notes. Truthfully, it’s an iPad Air that is (a) much cheaper, since the keyboard comes for free, and (b) runs more useful software. There are very few apps that Windows users will find missing on this computer, if there are any at all — that isn’t true for iPadOS.

As I said earlier, the MacBook Neo does come with compromises, as it is $500 cheaper than the MacBook Air. Here’s a list of features the MacBook Neo omits to reach its price tag, in order of most to least egregious:

• No keyboard backlighting.
• No ambient light sensor, omitting automatic brightness and True Tone.
• No Force Touch trackpad; this is the first Mac laptop since 2018 to have a “mechanical” trackpad.
• The base model does not have a Touch ID sensor.
• No head-tracked Spatial Audio with supported AirPods.
• No P3 wide color gamut display; only sRGB.
• No Thunderbolt ports; only USB 3.

I think the first two are embarrassing omissions, and they’ll probably be addressed in the next version. I’ll elaborate more on this later, but at $500, the MacBook Neo (at education pricing, especially) is already a loss-leader for Apple. The company built a new aluminum chassis for the product, is using expensive 3-nanometer processors from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and still ships 8 GB of RAM — perhaps one of the most expensive parts in the computer due to the memory shortage. These parts are not inexpensive, and Apple is making very little, if any, profit on the device. There’s a reason Chromebooks and Windows laptops at a similar price are much worse in performance and build quality — the companies that make those products rely on the revenue generated from selling them. The point is to get people who would have never bought a Mac into the Apple garden. If they subscribe to AppleCare+ and the Apple One bundle, that’s a jackpot for Apple. A newly minted forever Apple customer.

Because they’re already making a loss on this product, I don’t see why Apple didn’t spend a few more dollars per unit on an ambient light sensor and keyboard backlighting. Most people who use this computer don’t know how to touch-type and will need lighting to see the keys, and I assume many users will be confused that they must adjust the brightness manually. (I think True Tone is a lesser omission.) Other than these two oddities, the remaining omissions are largely irrelevant for this computer’s target demographic: casual, primarily mobile consumers. The trackpad will still be much better than any high-end Windows laptop; nobody uses Spatial Audio; biometrics are considered premium; and don’t get me started about color gamuts and port specifications. Nobody cares about those — nobody will hook this computer up to a Studio Display that costs more than double the price of the laptop itself.

For this reason, I don’t think the memory and storage limitations are problematic, either. Nerds, presumably like the readers of this blog, aren’t aware of how people use computers in their daily lives. A vast majority — over 95 percent — of people’s desktop computing happens in the browser. School essays are written in Google Docs, email is done in Gmail, and people talk to artificial intelligence chatbots through their websites. There’s a reason Chromebooks, which primarily run Google Chrome, are so popular: The browser is the computer for most people. Apple wants to target that demographic, which is not segregated by age but by profession. School-aged middle and high school children write essays in Google Docs. People in their working prime need a computer not to write code or edit video, but to pay bills and book flights. For their work, they have a work-issued computer.

The MacBook Neo excels at all of these tasks. It will run Chrome just fine, and, again, will render the websites people go to with ease. It’s a Chromebook, only with better quality and the ability to run apps if one wants to. This computer doesn’t need to dock to an external display or run multiple apps at once — it just needs to be good at running Google Chrome, because that’s the computer for most people. It’s the first laptop to be good at this and be well built, all at an affordable price. To appeal to that market, Apple needs to be aware of not hardware excellence, but cost. $600 is affordable for most adults, and the $500 price for students makes the computer enormously attractive for middle and high school students who need a keyboard to take notes and write essays.

I also think this computer is appealing to college students, but less so than the MacBook Air. Having a larger screen and the ability to run more intense apps for creative projects, like the Creative Cloud suite, are necessities for most college students. Apple will still happily sell them a MacBook Neo as long as it gets them in the door, but the price delta between the MacBook Neo and the MacBook Air is so large that it draws a clear line between products. Crucially, they’re very conspicuously aimed at different segments of the market: people who rarely use a laptop, and people who spend all day on one. Anyone who spends hours a day on the computer might want to plug it into a nice monitor, and the MacBook Neo simply doesn’t support that. It’s really meant to be the home computer of the 2020s. I surmise that few people will compare the MacBook Air and MacBook Neo because they’re priced so differently.

All of this market analysis is to illustrate that whatever limitations the MacBook Neo has are largely irrelevant in context. It’s the best cheap laptop on the market, and it strongly appeals to its primary demographic. Sales will undoubtedly be slow in the months ahead because it’ll take time to permeate the market. People will cross-shop it at Best Buy, and schools will begin to integrate it into their classrooms in the coming years. The people who buy computers like these hold onto them for a while, and when it’s time to buy a new one, they take a while to make a choice. I think Apple knows this and will market it in a way that appeals to these people. Either way, it’s not a failure if it doesn’t sell like hotcakes within the first quarter.

What gives me so much optimism about this product is the remarkable difference between the MacBook Neo and its competitors. Unquestionably, Wednesday’s announcement sent shockwaves through the PC world, but no matter how hard they try, they won’t be able to vanquish Apple. As long as a company relies on the steady income from cheap laptop sales to survive, the MacBook Neo will eclipse its products. It’s like a rotisserie chicken at Costco — they sell so well because Costco doesn’t need them to survive. The MacBook Neo, ultimately, is a loss-leader made possible by not only genius supply chain management from Apple’s C-suite, but also remarkable engineering talent. Apple has 3-nm fabrication nailed down to a science, and it keeps last year’s chips around long enough to make the MacBook Neo possible even at high volumes.

The MacBook Neo is an idiosyncratic success story for Apple. I’d argue it’s the company at its finest, making products for normal people that largely surpass the competition. It’s a well-considered, thoughtful product that relies on the performance and cost-efficiency of Apple silicon, as well as a willingness from Apple to take a gamble on it. My hunch is that the gambit will succeed.

Studio Displays

Perhaps on the opposite side of the consumer-to-professional spectrum were the updates to Apple’s display line. The Studio Display, first released in 2022, received a minor update with a better camera and speakers, while the Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch locally dimmed mini-LED display first introduced with the 2019 Mac Pro, was replaced by the new 27-inch Studio Display XDR. Both of these announcements are interesting for different reasons, and they simultaneously clean up and mess up the Apple display lineup in inscrutable ways. The Studio Display still starts at $1,600, while the Studio Display XDR starts at $3,300 — a $2,700 price cut for 5 fewer inches of display panel. The pricing of one of these products is far more egregious than the other.

I genuinely believe the Studio Display XDR is the less complicated of the two products, despite its novelty. The display panel is locally dimmed, much like the Pro Display XDR it replaces. It is not organic-LED, but rather, employs the improved mini-LED technology found in the latest generation of MacBooks Pro. That is to say, while an OLED display would light each pixel individually, a mini-LED display divides the screen into small subsections known as dimming zones. Each of these dimming zones has its own backlight, emulating the effect of an OLED display at a much lower cost. Apple calls this technology “Liquid Retina XDR,” as the display can properly show high dynamic range content with pitch-dark blacks and luminous highlights. Anyone who has owned a MacBook Pro in the last few years knows just how stunning these displays are — they are not OLED-caliber, but they are close.

The Pro Display XDR cost $5,000, or $6,000 with the separately sold Pro Stand, because this mini-LED technology was so new at the time. Apple experimented with expanding it through a new manufacturing process in the 2021 12.9-inch iPad Pro before it finally brought it to the MacBooks Pro the same year. Since this change, the Pro Display XDR’s panel was noticeably worse — albeit better than the rest of Apple’s displays — than those found in the MacBooks Pro. To address both the price and this long-in-the-tooth product, Apple brought this updated mini-LED panel to the new Studio Display XDR. The panel also supports 120-hertz ProMotion and enhanced color accuracy for professional work, all notable and past-due improvements.

The one quirk about this product is that it is noticeably smaller and cheaper than its predecessor. Online commentators have talked about this display as if it were somehow absolved of its ancestry, i.e., as if it’s not a successor to the Pro Display XDR. It is the Pro Display XDR, with a nicer ProMotion panel, but much smaller. This begs the central question: Why did Apple discontinue the 32-inch variant? The obvious guess is that it didn’t sell well, but that’s sensible, knowing that just the display’s stand cost as much as a MacBook Air. If Apple included this stand, as it now does for the Studio Display XDR, I think it could’ve gotten away with selling a 32-inch variant for $4,500 or so. I think the problem is less the size (or, rather, demand for the size) and more the price. Apple clearly recognized this, leading to the competitive price of the Studio Display XDR.

I know I will catch flak for calling the Studio Display XDR’s price “competitive,” but I stand by that statement. As longtime readers of my work know, I am no apologist for Apple’s display pricing, as will become apparent in a few paragraphs. However, it’s indisputable that $3,300 is reasonable for a MacBook Pro-quality monitor scaled up to 27 inches. That is to say, if one tried, one could reasonably justify this price. Again, anyone with a 2021 MacBook Pro or later, including myself, can testify that the screen is gorgeous. If not for the tandem OLED display of the 2024 iPad Pro, I would say it’s the best panel Apple ships. Charging $3,300 for the same panel but larger, plus packaging, is not entirely unreasonable. I don’t think it’s a great value — it would have to be close to $2,500 for me to say so — and I certainly won’t be buying one, but judging by how much the Pro Display XDR cost, this is a meaningful step forward for Apple’s display line.

Don’t mistake this analysis for fandom, however, because Apple does still sell an outrageously priced monitor: the $1,600 standard Studio Display. To put this monitor into context, it is effectively the same panel as the one found in the 5K iMac from 11 years ago. It is the exact same panel as the one from the eight-year-old iMac. The most striking part of this comparison is that, when that computer was last sold in March 2022, it cost $1,800 — only $200 more than what the Studio Display retailed at in the same month. For $200 more in 2022, you could buy a full computer with the same display and an Intel Core i5 processor, 256 GB of storage, and 8 GB of RAM. And four years later, selling the exact same panel, Apple has not reduced the price by even a cent. This price is disgraceful — it is a blatant markup to nickel-and-dime Mac consumers who just want a decent, Retina display from Apple.

I was offended by this product in 2022 for this exact reason, and now I’m emboldened by it. I’m convinced Apple executives looked at the price, laughed at it, and decided to ship it anyway because this panel has no competition. Not one company on the market, even four years after the Studio Display’s initial introduction, has replicated this specific panel, which is important because it has the exact dimensions for perfect Retina resolution on macOS. This panel was engineered by Apple and made by LG for Macs, and nobody has tried to sell a copy. I guarantee that if Samsung — or even LG itself — sold the same panel for $800 in these four years, Apple would’ve been compelled to lower the price by at least a few hundred dollars. $1,600 for this product is abominable and offensive.

The most common critique I’ve received of this comparison is perhaps even more offensive than the value proposition of the monitor: that a webcam and speakers, not to mention the Apple design, warrant the $1,600 price tag. Some even say that because there is no competition, Apple is selling a boutique product, and that is reason in and of itself to sell the display at a markup. These are absurd defenses of the Studio Display. For one, a comparable — if not better quality — webcam and set of speakers could be found for $300 total. This panel was not worth $1,300 in 2022, and it certainly isn’t today, four years later. Second, just because there’s no competition for this panel doesn’t mean that Apple’s pricing is any less egregious. The point of capitalism, as I alluded to in the MacBook Neo section of this article, is for fierce competition to drive prices down and/or meaningfully improve product quality. No capitalism is happening here, and the exaggerated result is an expired display panel that costs double what it should.

I’m not opposed to Apple selling monitors at high prices to professional users, as I explained in the Studio Display XDR portion. I am, however, opposed to Apple retaining the same display panel for eight years, without even ProMotion at a bare minimum, and selling that display for $1,600. The fundamental difference between four years ago and now is that consumer expectations have changed; the market has done what capitalism is supposed to do and made better products (high-refresh-rate displays). Apple, however, continues to sell its customers a subpar product at an astronomically high price. The standard Studio Display is not only expensive for what it is, but its existence entirely is unjustified. Technology companies are incentivized to either improve their products in four years or reduce prices. Apple has done neither.

M5 Pro and M5 Max

The last announcement I want to touch on is the M5 Pro and M5 Max. For the first time since the launch of these high-end Apple silicon processors, the architecture is fundamentally different. Previously, beginning with the M1 Pro and M1 Max, Apple scaled the M1 to add more processor cores to the die. This meant that the M1 Pro and M1 Max processors — and their successors, up to the M4 — were scaled-up, monolithic (definition: single, not comprised of many parts) versions of the M1, increasing in manufacturing complexity. To produce the Pro and Max variants, Apple would redesign the original die to add more cores, then produce the larger die. The result was three distinct processors of increasing complexity.

The M5 changes this design process entirely. Instead of scaling up the base die (the M5) in design, Apple now uses a similar architecture to the UltraFusion interconnect introduced with the M1 Ultra in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The M1 Ultra, instead of scaling the M1 Max in chip design to include more processor cores, simply connected two pre-made versions of the M1 Max using the interconnect — it’s analogous to gluing the processors together. The M5 Pro and M5 Max replicate this architecture, “gluing” two processors¹ together to make one M5 Pro or M5 Max. The result is that Apple doesn’t design the M5 Pro and M5 Max separately — the more powerful versions are two copies of one processor put together.

The reason for this is to reduce manufacturing complexity. The more complexity — i.e., the more cores — a monolithic die has, the harder it is to produce, or fabricate, resulting in lower yield rates. (This means fewer fully functional, fault-free processors can be made.) To circumvent this, TSMC now, with the M5 Pro and M5 Max, simply fabricates the lower-complexity chip and connects two of them to produce an M5 Pro or M5 Max in the “packaging” stage of semiconductor manufacturing. Apple calls this new production strategy the “Fusion Architecture.”

The difference between the M5 Pro and M5 Max now lies in how many working cores the processors have — they are both physically two interconnected processors of less complexity. The M5 Pro uses binned processors — chips that have faulty cores due to manufacturing defects. These cores are simply turned off in software, a process known as processor binning. If all the cores are working in both interconnected chips, the conjoined processor is sold as an M5 Max.

To summarize, the M5 Pro and M5 Max are both the same processor — they have two of the same, less-complex die in them, glued together via the Fusion Architecture. What separates the M5 Pro and M5 Max is how many cores are working — partially functional interconnected dies are marketed as the M5 Pro, and fully functional ones are marketed as the M5 Max. Together, this strategy improves chip yields and manufacturing efficiency.

If that explanation seemed complicated, there’s more. Each Apple silicon processor — before the M5 — used a combination of performance and efficiency cores. Performance cores were designed to, as their name suggests, maximize performance through a slew of architecture changes that are too granular for the scope of this article. Efficiency cores were designed to use less power, with the trade-off that they would take longer than performance cores to execute the same set of instructions. The problem with this branding is that it led consumers — who are unfamiliar with the specifics behind the cores — to think that the efficiency cores were somehow not powerful enough to tackle difficult tasks. This is incorrect — the efficiency cores are nonchalantly powerful. As I write this article on my MacBook Pro, my efficiency cores are at 30 percent usage, while my performance cores are only at 1 percent. My computer, however, still feels very performant, and my battery life is great.

To reduce confusion, Apple renamed these cores in the M5 generation. In the standard M5, efficiency cores are still called “efficiency,” but performance cores are now renamed to “super” cores. Nothing has changed about these cores; these differences are codified in marketing. In fact, when the M5 was released last year, Apple called these cores “performance” — they have now been retroactively renamed to “super” cores. The M5 has six efficiency cores and four super cores.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max have a different kind of core than the M5. They don’t have “efficiency” cores, but instead, a new kind of core that balances efficiency and performance. Inscrutably, this core is known as a “performance” core, despite it not being the same core as prior performance cores. Those, again, are renamed “super” cores. The M5 Pro and M5 Max have 12 performance cores and six super cores, where “performance” cores are all-new and “super” cores are née “performance” cores.

All of this is very complicated, and as I check the clock, it took about an hour and a half for me to write about it. But the result is that the M5 processors bring a monumental architectural change to Apple silicon. The manufacturing process is different, the marketing names are different, and the M5 Pro and M5 Max have an all-new core that’s yet to be tested. And the most remarkable part of all of this is that the M5 is rumored to be the last generation on TSMC’s 3-nm process node; the M6, slated for this fall, is planned to switch to the cutting-edge 2-nm process.

The new MacBooks Pro, which these processors ship in, are the final hurrah for one of the best processor and hardware designs in Macintosh history, and it is fitting that this final generation received such an important architecture update. The new changes might be complex, but they prove what Apple can do at its finest.

There’s simultaneously a lot and only a little I didn’t cover from this week. The iPad Air remains a product in Apple’s lineup, the iPhone 17e is a marginally better value, and the MacBook Air is still one of the best laptops on the market. But coming back to the start of this article, Apple’s hardware is where the company shines. This week, while absent of any flashy AI announcements engulfing Silicon Valley, proves that Apple has still got it — even if the Studio Display is overpriced. Rest in power.