Mark Gurman: MacBook Neo is a game changer, but Apple's AI is still a mess

Summary

Apple's biggest product week in recent memory ended with the MacBook Neo as the headline act. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman argues it earns that billing. Priced at $600, or $500 for education, the Neo is Apple's first sub-$700 Mac, and Gurman expects it to move the needle not just on Mac sales but across the entire ecosystem, pulling new users into iPhones, Apple Watches, and iPads. The product was years in the making, made possible by Apple's ARM chip transition away from Intel and a new aluminum manufacturing process that reduces material waste and lowers production costs enough to make the economics work at this price point.

The rest of the launch wave, which included the iPhone 17e, M4 iPad Air, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, M5 MacBook Air, and two new Studio Displays, carried no surprises. The MacBook Pros missed their usual October window because the TSMC fabrication node wasn't ready in time. Apple had guided a strong March quarter, and the product wave explains why.

AI delay

The hardware story flatters Apple. The AI story does not. Gemini-powered Siri, originally slated for iOS 26.4 at the end of March, has slipped to iOS 26.5 in the May/June window, with full features now expected no earlier than iOS 27 later this year. Apple cancelled a planned press briefing in New York two weeks before launch. Gurman's read is blunt: this was not a strategy, it was a failure that happened to land softly because users are already running ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Gemini directly on Apple hardware anyway. Running third-party models natively on-device gives Apple cover to wait. Whether that cover holds through iOS 27 is genuinely uncertain.

Neo naming and portfolio logic

Apple retired the SE label with this launch. Gurman thinks Neo is a permanent replacement, not a one-off. The portfolio now reads Neo at the base, Air in the middle, and Pro at the high end, with Max and Ultra differentiating above that. Gurman draws the analogy to MacBook Air, three letters, catchy, and stretched across the whole lineup since Jobs introduced it in 2008. Neo has the same architecture.

Phone naming is messier and harder to fix. Carrier relationships and case-maker ecosystems make iPhone naming conventions sticky in ways Mac naming is not.

OpenAI hardware threat

Gurman covers OpenAI hardware as a primary beat and is skeptical of the pre-Super Bowl "Dime" device leak, saying every source he spoke to called it not real. The design credentials are not in doubt. Jony Ive's firm Love From is involved, and Gurman expects the hardware to look exceptional. The commercial question is harder. Google has world-class software, world-class hardware, and arguably the best consumer electronics advertising in years, and has made almost no dent in Apple's market share. Meta Ray-Bans are considered a category success at under 10 million units. Apple sells that many AirPods in roughly a quarter. The bar OpenAI needs to clear to matter at scale is essentially Apple-grade distribution, retail presence, and brand trust, none of which it currently has.

Apple's fast-follow capability is real but not unlimited. Samsung's new privacy display feature, which switches off pixels selectively so bystanders can't read your screen, is a genuine differentiator, and Gurman thinks Apple is at least a few years away from matching it. Samsung is both the component supplier and the hardware competitor, and it has no incentive to hand Apple the technology quickly. OLED took Apple four to five years to get after Samsung introduced it, and Apple still hasn't brought OLED to most of its Mac lineup.

Smart glasses

A contractor privacy story involving Meta Ray-Bans, where contractors reportedly had access to camera footage from users wearing the glasses, raises real questions about the category. Gurman expects Apple's eventual smart glasses to lead on privacy as a differentiating claim. He still thinks Meta has a meaningful first-mover advantage, backed by the Luxottica partnership, and expects new Meta glasses models to be competitive. At 7 million units, the category has pioneering numbers, not proven mass-market ones.