I thought today would finally be the day when Apple brought some consistency to their product line naming…and then they announced a MacBook called Neo. Neo is a prefix not a suffix, what the hell are they thinking in Cupertino? Terrible naming aside, I was overall impressed with the company managing to bring decent specs and industry-leading build quality to a $599 laptop. I expect holiday sales later this year will be chart topping.

There were initial impressions going around earlier today knocking the fact that one of the USB-C ports is only rated to USB 2.0 speeds. Sure, that feels very ‘90s, but for the customer base this machine will attract I guarantee you next to nobody will ever notice. It will be referred to as “the charging port” because they will never use it for any other purpose. According to an Apple spokesperson it was an inherent limitation to using an A-series chip that was originally designed for devices that only have a single USB-C port, the bus can’t handle more.

Yesterday I spoke about how impressed I was with recycled materials being a major focus of the Studio Displays, and now today I am even more impressed with the Neo. From the press release:

It features 60 percent recycled content — the highest percentage of any Apple product. This includes 90 percent recycled aluminum overall and 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery. The enclosure is manufactured with a material-efficient forming process that uses 50 percent less aluminum compared to traditional machining methods.

There being no RAM upgrade beyond the stock 8GBs is disappointing, but not surprising necessarily. I think within a year or two a newer A-series chip will be added, and that will result in a RAM bump to 12GBs like we’ve seen with recent iPhone releases. What I do not understand whatsoever is Touch ID being a $100 upgrade from the base model (that also bumps storage to 512GBs). For a company that touts security every chance they get it is an odd choice, especially since they sell the iPad for $349 with Touch ID included.