Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]
- USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
- USB 2.0 480 Mbps
Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)
I don't think this is intentional to cut cost. I simply think that the chip was primarily made for devices with one port (iPhone, iPad) and this is a bit of an afterthought.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a future product with 2x USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support on the next generation, A19 Pro or A20 Pro maybe, if the product has enough success.
This is going to be a primary complaint people have (even if it's not terribly important) - hopefully they have some circuitry that warns you if you're plugging something into the wrong port (e.g. a USB 3 device into USB 2 at slow speeds).
> This is going to be a primary complaint people have
No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.
I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...
I don't think people will have many complaints about this thing, but I do think this will be one of the primary (even though it's basically a non-complaint).
It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.
The same things Macbook pro users plug in where they'd see the USB speed differences. Just because someone isn't as privileged as to be able to afford a MacBook Pro instead of a Neo doesn't mean they don't have the same dreams and desires.
For monitors at least, if you plug in to the wrong port you will get a GUI prompt advising you to use the other one [1]:
> while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port.
I hope they added (or will add) that feature to other Macs too, on mine I had to try out different ports and check the settings to find the one which can go beyond 60Hz.
If they want to get these things into schools it would be insane to expect the schools to also supply everyone with AirPods or some other kind of wireless headphones.
AirPods have too much latency for playing music. You want wired audio for running GarageBand or Logic Pro with a MIDI controller. They could have gone with a USB-C to audio adapter, but then you wouldn't be able to plug the MIDI controller and charge the computer.
... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
> ... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
I've never had a USB-C port fail with many of them being plugged / unplugged multiple times a day for years. At most they fill with dust you have to fish out. Aux ports would often get in a state where you had to very carefully position the jack for it to work.
I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.
USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).
You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.
With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.
I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.
Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
And technology moves on either way. There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026. The number of people who care in 2026 is probably less than the number of people who want to run Linux on their phone.
Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.
Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.
We are in a thread on HN where you have people who complain about not having root access on your iPhone, want to run Linux on everything and bemoan the fact that most websites don’t work with JavaScript disabled.
This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.
Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on
I would very much like root on my phone and most of the websites I use don't require JavaScript. Apple hasn't dropped the headphone port, they even announced a new product today called the Macbook Neo with one. There is even a thread on HN about it :)
Or I can just not do stupid shit and listen to hifi headphones released in the past 2-3 years, many of which have a 3.5mm jack (and adapters for larger, if plugging into dac/pre-amps).
Which you said aren't being made anymore. Which is factually untrue. The best bit is, they're still being made! And there's plenty of people who are still buying them!
Why? Because a $170 pair of closed-backs sounds infinitely better than the $550 Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra nonsense.
FiiO FT1 32Ω being a prime example, if you are looking for closed back suggestions :^)
No I said high end phones are no more coming with headphone jacks than they are coming with SCSI and VGA ports. I’m sure it would be convenient for you if the iPhone came with a right and left 1/4 inch audio jack.
Why do they need to sound better? Also, in a lot of instances, they do sound better because they can offer powered functionality such as ANC. Can’t get that with a truly analog headphone. I’d never use analog headphones on a plane, for instance.
Low-end wired earbuds come in packages with dozens of units. I buy cheap earbuds because my kids love breaking them. Not everyone optimizes for the same thing. Analog remains the bees knees in certain settings.
Makes sense, the iphone has only one port after all. Interesting that it supported a second one though, or maybe that's the Pro revision designed for this use case?
The second port is likely necessary for USB hubs that rely on both ports. I had one for my M1 Air. I assume it'd still work with the 2 different speeds, but I'd be curious to try it.
I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.
I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.
Charging in and DisplayPort out on the same socket would mean an additional dongle or hub or something, so there's at least that reason for having both.
Unless you use a dock, where you plug your things in the dock. Then you would want the "good" one to be the one of the back so it looks more clean and also have easier access to the slow port in the rare case you want to plug something there instead of the fast dock.
At least we should both be happy that it exists, no matter where it is placed! This is a big improvement over the macbook 12 with just one port. This was too low even when using a dock.
Thunderbolt would presumably make it much more expensive, the spec has a ton of USB features that go from “optional” to “required” to be able to go into TBT alt mode, like supporting active cables
They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.
Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm
- Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
- Width: 30 vs 29.75
- Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
- Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.
But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).
Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.
I'm a bit too lazy to look it up, but this is surprising to me. I still have an 11-inch, and it has a huge bezel around it, but it still feels way, way smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
> If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air
It's two things that explain the optics vs reality are surprising.
One is bezels, they're quite large on the 11 inch.
Two is rounding, the 11 inch actually undersells things as it's 11.6 inches, the Neo is exactly 13 inch. So it's not 2 inches but 'just' 1.4 inches bigger, and with its thick bezels it bridges that 1.4 inch gap mostly.
While the 13 inch MBA is actually 13.6 inches.
In other words, the MBA has a 5% bigger screen than the Neo, despite being marketed both as '13 inch macbooks'.
5% doesn't sound like much, but it's the diagonal, meaning the height/width also scale by 5%, and the surface area therefore scales by 1.05^2 i.e. the screen of the '13' inch MBA is actually more like 10% bigger than the 13 inch Neo.
You answered your own question, its the bezel. They've gotten _much_ thinner since the 11 inch MBAs were a thing. Remember screen size is measured in diagonals, so even a 5mm reduction of bezel size both horizontally and vertically gains you a little over 7mm in screen size without a physical size increase. to gain 2 inches in screen size (50.8 mm) you'd only need to eliminate 0.74 inches (roughly) from all 4 sides. I don't know the exact measurements of the bezels on those older devices but I can tell you my M4 Air is less than half an inch on all sides.
EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.
The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!
It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!
Somewhere on my list of projects is "Gut a 12" Powerbook and put the guts of a modern M series Macbook in it". The chassis is so spacious and the Macbook Air logic boards are so small, physics is not going to be a problem. Just hooking up screens, the keyboard and trackpad (using the original, natch), and ports. There's already a high-res display swap you can do in that chassis to get to 1400x1050.
I'm very sad this neo macbook thing isn't a replacement for my macbook retina in any way. I'm not really sure what I'll do to replace it; I'd been hoping this "phone chip based macbook" would be of the old retina form factor. But instead it's just a nerfed air. My kids have the macbook airs and my little 2017 retina is substantially dramatically smaller and more portable. At least until the battery dies.
Those measurements are screen area. The old 11” had bezels that were almost an inch wide on each side. The actual laptop dimensions are almost exactly the same.
I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.
I was thinking yesterday while reading the Thinkpad repairability story that I would pay an unreasonable amount for basically this laptop in the chassis of an X220, with a 7 row keyboard and Mac touchpad.
This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.
No it isn't. It's 1.08kg vs 1.23kg, or 13% heavier.
And indeed it's 13 inch but the dimensions are quite similar, there is a 0.8% difference in width (with the 11 inch being wider surprisingly, due to the bezels) and a 7% difference in height (11 inch being shorter). At its thickest point the 11 inch is. 33% thicker. In terms of volume the 13 inch isn't any bigger.
The original Air lineup was thinner in the front and seemed a little lighter. The thicker front on newer airs gives more battery life, but I'm not a fan of it.
The thinness at the front was a bit of a hack though wasn’t it? So Steve Jobs could make it look good in photographs. I’d take the extra battery life any day.
The final version of the “wedge” Air case was an amazing piece of physical design. The lid had a large-radius complex curve that perfectly controlled reflections. The bottom case had a curve that made it look like the machine was hovering above the desktop from almost any angle. Calling that a “hack” is sort of like calling it a “hack” that a Ferrari looks fast even when it’s parked.
The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.
And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.
I think its a matter of the chonkers feeling like you're getting what you're paying for. "This thing is so expensive! WHY is it so thin?"
Of course the zeitgeist keeps changing and what made sense yesterday might look like madness for those that aren't following things closely. As for myself, I very much prefer "slightly chonkier, but better heat dissipation" (coming from owning an intel mb pro and using it on my lap often).
I have the M1 MBA and M5 MBP. The wedge MBA feels noticeably thinner and the MBP feels kind of chonky in comparison. It's a bigger difference moving them one-handed than the specs would indicate.
I'm in the same boat. I have one of the original M1 MacBook airs, and the thicker front feels like overall a downgrade in hardware. Going up to higher ram amounts might be good for some of my datasets, but it's not needed for any software I run.
So I guess I'll wait for the next cycle and hope they return to the "Air" idea again.
Chips and Cheese focuses on architecture and chip design, and I think a lot of the tooling is less refined on macOS, so the comparison graphs can't quite get the same depth on Apple's chips. That's just a guess.
If Apple introduces a $799 or $899 'value' MacBook (like iPad / iPad Air / iPad Pro lineup), they could say it's $300 off the MacBook Air's price now, with that $100 bump.
(I'm still surprised Apple isn't bumping their prices more due to RAM pricing, but maybe they're absorbing a little bit of their margins to potentially increase market share.)
Regular consumers probably don't buy these displays in bulk, when you can get very nice displays for less than half the price that are 98% the same on specs.
So targeting checkbox-compliance for places like hospital systems is probably an easy win to generating / keeping some long term contracts.
> you can get very nice displays for less than half the price that are 98% the same on specs.
Can you recommend any displays with PPI and brightness equivalent to the studio display, with 120Hz+ refresh rates? I was waiting for this announcement to buy a studio display because I thought they might bring 120Hz to the base model, but $3300 is a lot to spend on a single display. I have an original studio display and a high refresh rate 4K OLED monitor, and they are both compromises unfortunately.
I don't think you can get a DICOM-certified display at 5K and 27" for half the price. Probably like $1k less but that's it - and if you're a radiologist making $300k+ you're not going to want to cheap out on a display.
If you're a radiologist making $300k+ you're going to want to use certified displays so that you don't get sued for using non-approved devices for diagnostic use, and that's going to cost you maybe $6k for a 21" monitor.
The closest they ever came to something similar was the far too expensive 12" MacBook, and the far-too-compromised PowerBook Duo (IMHO).
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