MacBook Neo at $699 — is it still worthwhile, or should you get the new XPS 13 instead?
The MacBook Neo's price has increased by $100 to $699 due to Apple's recent price hikes. This price change may lead some consumers to consider alternative options, such as the new Dell XPS 13, which starts at the same price. The MacBook Neo is still Apple's most affordable Mac, but its value proposition has changed with the price increase.
- ▪The MacBook Neo's starting price is now $699, a $100 increase from its original price of $599.
- ▪The Dell XPS 13 is a potential alternative to the MacBook Neo, with a starting price of $699 and features like a touch display and up to 1TB of SSD storage.
- ▪The MacBook Neo is still a suitable option for students and those invested in the Apple ecosystem, but its performance may not be as strong as other laptops in its price range.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/macbook-neo-at-usd699-is-it-still-worthwhile-or-should-you-get-the-new-xps-13-instead |
| Publication time | Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-30T06:59:53.391Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-30T07:00:01.925Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rLz7Q67IngGt |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Laptops MacBooks MacBook Neo at $699 — is it still worthwhile, or should you get the new XPS 13 instead? News By Tony Polanco published 30 June 2026 The MacBook Neo is now $100, thanks to recent Apple price hikes When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Tom's Guide) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Apple price hikes are official for all of the company’s devices, and the MacBook Neo is no exception. Originally starting at $599, Apple’s budget laptop now starts at $699.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Guide.
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