Christina WarrenThere are obvious deficits to the MacBook Neo — connectivity is a huge one, but I’m just stoked there is a $500 MacBook (assuming you use the student discount, which of course you obviously should) and in fun colors!
Jason Snell@film_girl I just wonder how much connectivity the buyers of a $599 laptop need....
@jsnell I think having only a single USB 3 port sucks, full stop. It’s offensive to me, tbh. The DTK from 6 years ago had better than this. The bandwidth problem here makes even getting a dock a very, very difficult trade-off. Especially when full MacBook Airs with 16GB of RAM have been available (granted not widely for $600, but certainly for $700 more commonly). We can quibble on if the buyer cares, but my point is they shouldn’t have to worry.
Dan Moren@film_girl @jsnell I agree that I don't think most people buying this will know or care BUT I do think there's a usability problem, when you plug in to the wrong port and don't know why everything is slower. That seems like a bad experience.
@dmoren @jsnell I think that they will care when it bites them in the ass. Which it will if they try to use this as more than a Chromebook. And maybe the average buyer won’t do that. But I also feel like it’s sort of shitty for us to assume that buyers of $600 or $700 computers don’t know or care about stuff like this. This is a good price for a Mac but come on.
@film_girl @jsnell I get your point, and I'm not trying to be shitty about it. I think the vast majority of users—*all* users—mainly plug stuff into their laptops to charge, and data transfer rates don't even end up figuring into it. And, like I said, I think the worse sin is that they're not the same, so how do you even know which port is the "good" one?
It will be interesting to see if they do rev this next year and add the A19 Pro whether it will have two USB-3 ports.
Jonathan Gulbrandsen@dmoren @film_girl @jsnell they thought of that part: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-usb-c-port-limitation/
