TL;DR: Meet the MacBook Neo—Apple's cheapest laptop ever, announced yesterday following the release of a budget-option iPhone on Monday. As customers balk at higher prices from tariffs and RAM shortages, the company known for exorbitantly priced tech gear is making a statement: It won’t give an inch to its budget-friendly competitors. And it could be the right play for the company at exactly the right time.

What happened: At just $599, the 13-inch MacBook Neo is the thriftiest line of laptops Apple has ever released. It’ll actually run you the same amount as the new entry-level iPhone 17e, and it comes in four colors, including a soft “blush” and “citrus” shade.

These product launches might seem out of character for a company that once charged $999 just for a monitor stand and still charges $19 for a polishing cloth, but it’s also a sign of the times. The cost of DRAM has shot up by about 171% in a year, and the price of tech gadgets has been climbing quickly—making affordable options more attractive to sticker-shocked consumers.

Why the Neo is so cheap: If you’re wondering whether there’s a catch—maybe the Neo is the first MacBook made of cardboard—the crucial cost-saving factor is that this laptop is basically an iPhone with a much bigger screen and a keyboard, using the same A18 Pro chip as the last-gen iPhone 16 Pro. Like the 16 Pro, the Neo has just 8GB of RAM—the MacBook Airs all come with 16GB these days—and it only has a slim 256GB of storage.

There are other tradeoffs with the Neo, too: It uses a mechanical trackpad instead of Force Touch, the base model doesn't include Touch ID, and the keyboard isn't backlit. While Apple's latest refresh focuses heavily on integrated AI and the Neo's product page claims it was "built for Apple Intelligence,” its base 8GB of RAM is only just enough to run Apple Intelligence, leaving very little headroom for anything else.

The Neo’s cheapness is also propped up by price hikes on all other MacBooks, with the new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro now running up to $400 more at $3,899 (the base version is $1,699). The fact that Apple charges a premium on these high-end models means it can likely afford to take lower margins on the Neo.

How Apple is budget-mogging its competitors: Apple is essentially the only Big Tech firm that’s primarily a hardware company. It already dominates the smartphone market, commanding 69% of it in the US and 20% globally last year. The big selling point of its rivals, including large Chinese phone makers like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, is that they offer more affordable options than Apple’s shiny luxury goods. Now, as these lower-margin brands pretty much uniformly raise prices, their value proposition may dim—giving Apple a ripe opportunity to slide in and bite off even more market share.

Part of what makes Apple so resilient is structural. The iPhone maker designs its own chips in-house and, being TSMC's single largest customer, gets preferential access to supply. Apple's scale also lets it lock in component pricing and supply commitments far in advance, leaving it somewhat better insulated from memory and chip cost shocks than virtually any of its rivals.

The education gambit: Apple’s budget pivot isn’t just about holding tight on market share as hardware gets more expensive pretty much across the board—it might also be a way to make gains in the education space (the bright colorways for the Neo seem to support this theory). The US alone spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools in 2024. Some are already calling the Neo the “Chromebook killer”—though Google hasn’t announced price hikes for these budget computers yet, and the lowest-end models can still be found for much cheaper than $600.

The bottom line: Everyone else is raising prices, and consumers are feeling the squeeze on their wallets. Apple is using this moment to finally charge you less—and it could make out like a bandit because of it. —WK

Break up with your midnight spiral

Every night, I tell myself I’m just going to “check one thing” on my phone—and then suddenly it’s 1am, and I’ve absorbed enough bad news to file for emotional bankruptcy. Doomscrolling isn’t just a tough habit to break. It’s almost a reflex, a muscle memory of the modern brain. It makes me anxious and exhausted, and yet, I scroll anyway (like maybe this time the internet will surprise me with something other than chaos).

We’ve told you about how setting your phone to grayscale can help reduce your screen time, but Tech Brew reader Jacob from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has an even simpler, low-tech solution that keeps his “intentions in check” when it comes to device usage: an alarm clock.

The setup: Whenever Jacob wants to burn some time on social media—but doesn’t want to end up doomscrolling—he sets multiple alarms: a 10-minute alarm, an 11-minute alarm, and a 12-minute alarm. The three interruptions are enough to get him to put the phone down. You can use the alarm on your phone so it visually disrupts what you’re looking at or even an old-school alarm clock across the room (so you have to physically get up to turn it off).

If you don’t think you have the self-discipline for this hack to work for you, you can also try a screen time management app, like Opal (which we reviewed in a previous newsletter edition). Other app recommendations from Tech Brew readers include:

Clearspace: Youssef from London, England, says it’s “effective in creating the friction which leads to the habit of reduced screen time.”

ScreenZen: James from Frisco, Texas, “regained so much free time,” increased his productivity, and found his mind feeling “more clear than ever” after using the app.

Jomo: Sarah from San Francisco, California, says this app “became a game changer.”

One Sec: Jack, from Wichita, Kansas, saved “so many hours by not scrolling on Reels without realizing” thanks to this app.

And if you want something that creates even more work for you to scratch that digital itch, we also tried Brick, a physical device you have to tap with your phone to unblock apps before using them. —CM

If you have a tech tip or life hack you just can’t live without, fill out this form and you may see it featured in a future edition.

How many software engineers does it take to write code? The answer in 2026 is somewhere close to zero—all you need is Claude. Emphasis on need. A series of Claude outages this week has apparently left software devs in shambles, and across the internet they’ve been agonizing over how the downtime slammed the brakes on their workdays. A snippet of the fallout: One user said the disruption felt like “someone pulled the power cable on half my brain.” Another joked, “Hope you all remember what a variable is.” Coding by hand, like in the ancient days? As unthinkable as looking up answers in a physical book.

Reminder: Claude Code was only released in February 2025. In the blink of an eye, “vibe coding” has taken the tech world by storm, with Spotify boasting recently that its “best” devs don’t write individual lines of code anymore (let’s hope for their sake that the company is Team Gemini).

It’s not that the Claude Code crowd doesn’t know how to code—it’s that AI has made it too easy to smash the “write this feature” button, much like how navigation apps have made it optional to know your way around your own backyard. One senior software engineer told Business Insider that “it's just simple to use an LLM even for the simplest things now.” But some studies have shown that overreliance on AI can lead to “cognitive debt,” reducing your ability to think critically and impacting memory. (Good thing some major companies, like Meta and Accenture, are starting to tie performance reviews to AI use.)

“This really is terrible. I cannot believe how much I rely on it for my work,” reads a comment from one Redditor about the Claude outage. Unfortunately, somewhere out there a C-suite bigwig might be taking these reactions as a thumbs up to follow Block's playbook. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5