Tech

Apple’s MacBook Neo is winning over a new generation of buyers

Published

2 months ago

June 2, 2026

Nearly three months after its debut, Apple’s MacBook Neo is emerging as an early success story, helping the Cupertino company reach new customers and challenging long-held assumptions about who buys a Mac.

Apple shipped 1.1 million MacBook Neo units in the quarter ended March, according to data from market intelligence provider IDC, shared with TechCrunch, ahead of the recent MacBook Air (M5) and MacBook Pro (M5) launches. Those MacBooks shipped over 900,000 and 550,000 units, respectively, in their debut quarters.

The figure is notable because the Neo was available for only about three weeks during the quarter after going on sale in mid-March, said Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC, adding that shipments began to spike from early April.

Introduced in early March with a starting price of $599, roughly 45% below the entry-level MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo was designed to make the Mac more accessible to a broader set of buyers. The laptop retains much of the look and feel of Apple’s premium notebooks, including an aluminum chassis and a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, while making some compromises to reach the lower price point, including using an A18 Pro chip instead of an M-series processor and offering 8GB of memory in the base model.

So far, the market appears to be responding to Apple’s strategy. Demand for the Neo, Singh said, has exceeded expectations in several countries, including India, where retailers have struggled to secure enough inventory.

Of the MacBook Neo units shipped globally during the March quarter, 44% were shipped to the U.S., per IDC. India, meanwhile, accounted for close to 18,000 shipments despite the laptop being available for only a few weeks during the period.

The MacBook Neo starts at ₹69,900 (about $733) in India, compared with ₹119,900 (around $1,260) for the entry-level MacBook Air.

“Rising prices of Windows notebooks and attractive pricing of the Neo have led to its very high demand,” Singh told TechCrunch.

The Neo’s popularity could also reshape Apple’s strategy in markets such as India, where older MacBook models such as the M1, M2, and M3 Air have historically been important volume drivers when sold at discounted prices during sales events, according to IDC senior market analyst Bharath Shenoy.

“We need to see how that pans out going ahead due to Neo’s rising popularity,” Singh said.

Speaking during Apple’s April earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said customer response to the MacBook Neo had been “off the charts” and acknowledged that the company was facing supply constraints following the launch. Cook also said Apple had set a March-quarter record for customers new to the Mac, partly driven by the Neo.

Counterpoint Research sees the significance of the Neo extending beyond its early sales. The laptop is helping Apple expand beyond its traditional customer base by attracting first-time Mac buyers and competing in lower-priced notebook segments where Macs have historically had little presence, said David Naranjo, associate director at the research firm.

He added that the Neo could eventually help Apple increase its share of the $400-$699 notebook market from about 2% to around 15%.

“Although it is still early, the MacBook Neo launch stands out as one of Apple’s most strategically important recent Mac releases, especially as the wider PC market deals with rising memory costs and ‘shrinkflation,’ while Apple is expanding its reach,” Naranjo told TechCrunch.

IDC’s Singh believes the opportunity extends beyond first-time buyers. Apple, he said, is targeting the Neo at a much broader audience than previous Mac models, a strategy that could help the company gain share in consumer and small-business laptop segments.

The MacBook Neo’s early success is already prompting competitors to respond. Dell this week unveiled a new XPS 13, starting at $699, aimed at the same segment, and said the MacBook Neo’s arrival had demonstrated strong demand for premium-quality laptops at more accessible prices.

That said, the launch-quarter figures may tell only part of the story, with Singh forecasting a “very big spike” in Neo shipments in the current quarter as Apple works through supply constraints and expands availability.

Apple did not respond to a request for comments.

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Tech

Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.

Published

5 hours ago

August 8, 2026

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As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times.

The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the data center will “be powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.” (Data centers face growing political opposition for a number of reasons, including their effect on electricity costs.)

AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

The Amazon spokesperson said, “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” while also claiming, “Our commitment hasn’t changed.”

Tech

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

Published

7 hours ago

August 8, 2026

qasimgillani

NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT.

The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.”

The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” So by joining OpenAI, the team will “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming “a few months late,” as the acquisition took place “earlier this year.”

Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.

Tech

X replaces ‘misaligned’ revenue sharing program with Original Content Rewards

Published

10 hours ago

August 8, 2026

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X, the social media platform now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is shaking up how it pays influencers and creators.

In announcing the change, the company said it will be winding down its existing Revenue Sharing program and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. X will stop accepting new Revenue Sharing participants, while existing participants will continue earning money through September 7.

Then, starting on September 8, they’ll be able to apply for the new program. Participants will still need to subscribe to one of X’s Premium tiers, and there will be qualifying thresholds for follower count (500 verified followers) and impressions (500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in 90 days), but it sounds like the big change is the emphasis on originality.

What counts as original content? X said it can include original reporting and analysis, photos and videos created by the poster, or memes and graphics they’ve designed themselves. Commentary also counts, but “if your content regularly incorporates material created by others, you’ll need to contribute meaningful original value for it to qualify under our original content guidelines.”

The company also included examples of posts that won’t count as original, such as those just copied over from another account, downloaded from one account and re-uploaded to your own, or reposting content “without meaningful transformation.”

This announcement follows repeated attempts by X to reform the Revenue Sharing program, for example reducing payments to aggregators and “clickbait” accounts in April. But these efforts have also prompted complaints from popular accounts profiting from the current system; Musk even reversed some of those changes (giving a creator’s local audience more weight when calculating payouts) after a backlash.

In a post about the new changes, X’s Allegra Jacchia wrote that the existing program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.”

“Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts,” she said. “We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.”

Jacchia added that X be “continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time.”

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