Apple MacBook Neo is probably the most important new consumer electronics product of this still-new year. It’s not the most powerful laptop Apple has ever produced, but few products have thrown open the door to a new market and buying possibilities in quite the same way.

The MacBook Neo arrives as a budget-laptop-busting portable that starts at just $599 / £599 / AU$899 ($499 / £499 / AU$749 for the education market) and rewrites the rules for a budget laptop.

Is this the MacBook you’ve been waiting for?

It should be noted that $599 will not get you the Touch ID power button, and if you want that and 512GB, you will pay $699 / £699 / AU$1,099. Now, that’s still an excellent price, and it reminds me a bit of the Walmart sales on those MacBook Air M1 laptops. Any time the deal approached $699, they would fly off the shelves.

Now imagine a 2.7-lb / 1.23kg, recycled aluminum laptop with a high-resolution Liquid Retina Display, spatial-audio speakers, two USB-C ports (only one is a fast USB-3), an HD webcam, and a large physical trackpad for $599 — and it’s a MacBook, running MacOS.

In my experience, people shopping for low-cost laptops for students (grade school, high school, college) are often not considering MacBooks because of the cost. $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799 (16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage to start) is a fair value for the MacBook Air, but it’s not a budget system.

Those shopping at big box retailers and online are often looking at $300 (or cheaper) Chromebooks and then suffering the consequences of underpowered systems. If they want more local power and storage, they’re usually paying $400-to-$700 anyway. Apple’s MacBook line was not in that range.

Rewriting the rules

The MacBook Neo changes that equation, and in style no less. I’ve seen and touched the new MacBook Neo (at Apple’s March Experience event), and it is every bit an Apple product.

Budget laptops can feel plasticky (because they often are) and feature dull screens and muffled audio. The MacBook Neo features all the materials and tolerances you expect from an Apple product.

It’s attractive and colorful, with hues that bleed all the way onto the keyboard.

Now, I can’t yet speak to the performance of the A18 Pro with 8GB of RAM on a 13-inch laptop. But in my brief experiences with it thus far, it looked relatively peppy, even playing a new Oceanhorn 2 Apple Arcade game with some pretty nice-looking atmospheric effects.

I’m sure we’ll test one in short order and know the full capabilities and deficits of Apple’s new budget laptop, but my prediction is that the MacBook Neo is the hottest product of the back-to-school season, Apple’s gonna sell them by the boatload, and supplies will be very limited.

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A 38-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and “on line” meant “waiting.” He’s a former Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.

Lance Ulanoff makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Mark, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.