#apple-hardware

#apple-hardware

It's not the basic MacBook. Or the cheap MacBook. Or the mini MacBook. It's the MacBook "Neo," meaning new or young-a fresh take on an old idea. Love the name or hate it, you likely see what Apple was attempting to communicate from a marketing perspective. It's meant to be a new kind of Mac for a new generation-perhaps an attempt to recapture a generation that's only been exposed to iPads and Chromebooks.

Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver "up to 2x" the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 Pro and Max laptops. In our testing, the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro bore that out: our unit could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed.

It's been a wild week for Apple. After announcing a slew of new hardware, the company capped things off with its cheapest laptop ever: the $599 MacBook Neo. It's low on specs, but high on character and value. In this episode, Devindra and Engadget Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham dive into the MacBook Neo, as well as the refreshed MacBook Air M5, MacBook Pro M5 Pro/Max, iPad Air M4 and iPhone 17e.

Large language models are currently everyone's solution to everything. The technology's versatility is part of its appeal: the use cases for generative AI seem both huge and endless. But then you use the stuff, and not enough of it works very well. And you wonder what we're really accomplishing here. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay rejoins the show full of thoughts about the current state of AI - particularly after spending a summer trying to get his smart home to work.

When a brand becomes iconic, simplicity is the ultimate flex.