I got hands-on with Apple’s brand-new MacBook Neo at the event, and this is a totally different category for them: a real budget-friendly MacBook. The starting price is $599, and for students it drops to $499, which is honestly kind of mind-blowing for an Apple laptop. I walked through what you actually get for that price—like the 13-inch Liquid Retina display rated at 500 nits—and my first impressions of how it looks in this environment. Apple’s also getting playful with colors here (citrus, indigo, silver, blush), and I really like the attention to detail with the color-matched keyboard and even matching feet on the bottom. Under the hood, the big story is the A18 Pro processor—the same chip from the iPhone 16 Pro models—now inside a MacBook, which we haven’t seen before. From the quick hands-on, multitasking and some gaming seemed fine, but I’m most curious about real-world performance: can it actually handle video editing, or is it more of a note-taking/light-use machine? Apple’s claiming up to 16 hours of battery life (about 2 hours less than a MacBook Air), and port-wise it’s minimal: two USB-C ports (one faster than the other), a headphone jack, and side-firing speakers. This one’s going to need full testing, but if it performs well at this price, I can see it flying off shelves.