March 4 (Reuters) - Apple on Wednesday unveiled the MacBook Neo, a lower-priced addition to its laptop lineup starting at $599, as it looks to broaden its reach in a price-sensitive PC market while rivals face tighter supply of memory chips.
A lower-priced laptop marks one of Apple's most aggressive entry points into the PC market in years. The new MacBook will be powered by the A18 Pro chip, the same processor that debuted in the company's iPhone 16 Pro models in 2024.
At $599, it is far cheaper in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms than Apple's previous non-Pro, non-Air MacBook, which debuted in May 2006 at $1,099 - roughly $1,750 in today’s dollars.
Customers can pre-order the device starting Wednesday, with deliveries and in-store availability beginning March 11, Apple said.
"The real question is not whether Apple can sell a MacBook at this price (because it will be one of the most sold Macs ever if they can deliver), but how it balances cost, performance and brand positioning while maintaining the premium experience that defines the Mac," said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices at IDC.
The new MacBook is not Apple's first foray into the price point. The company made a special $699 MacBook Air for Walmart using its M1 chip, which originally debuted in 2020, after retiring other models with that chip.
The new MacBook aims squarely at users of Google-powered Chromebooks and lower-end Windows devices, where Microsoft's own efforts to shift to more battery-life-friendly chips made with technology from Arm have failed to ignite a sales boom.
Its foray into the mid-range PC segment could help Apple broaden its reach among students and first-time buyers.
In the midst of a global memory chip crunch, the new MacBookalso comes with only 8 gigabytes of unified memory,half of the 16 gigabytes in the M4-based MacBook and less than the 12 gigabytes in the iPhone 17 Pro.
Global PC and smartphone markets remain highly price sensitive after several quarters of uneven demand, and hardware makers continue to navigate fluctuating component costs, particularly for memory chips.
Apple this week launched its $599 iPhone 17e with higher base storage and refreshed its MacBook Air and Pro lineup with new M5 chips and standard configurations with larger memory, as it looks to defend market share in competitive smartphone and softening PC markets, which are strained by rising memory costs.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram, Aditya Soni in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Anil D'Silva)
