Apple's $699 MacBook Is About to Change Everything

A sub-$700 MacBook. That sentence didn't exist until right now. Apple — the $999-and-up club, the "you get what you pay for" brand — is about to sell you a MacBook for $699. Apple just sent out event invites today for March 4th, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has confirmed this is where they'll announce it. And it's coming in colors. I can't make this up.

Now I know a lot of people are already calling this a glorified Chromebook with a logo on it. I don't think that's fair, but I also don't think this is some revolutionary device either. It's Apple doing what Apple does best — finding a gap in the market and filling it with something that's just good enough to get people hooked on the ecosystem. Let me break it all down.

What We Know So Far

Apple is calling it just "MacBook." Not Air, not Pro. Just MacBook. They used that name before with the 12-inch MacBook back in 2015, and that thing was... not great. But that was a decade ago and Apple silicon has completely changed what's possible at the low end.

Codenamed J700, this thing is aimed directly at students, first-time Mac buyers, and — this is the big one — Chromebook users. Apple is looking at the millions of $500-$700 Chromebooks sitting in schools and offices and saying "we can take that market." And honestly? They probably can.

The wild card here is the chip. Instead of an M-series processor, Apple is putting an A18 Pro in this — the same chip from the iPhone 16 Pro. First time ever they've put an iPhone processor in a Mac laptop. That's how they hit $699, and that's also what's going to make or break this thing.

And the colors. Silver, blue, pink, yellow — all aluminum, not plastic. Apple isn't making this look like a budget laptop. They're going full iMac energy with it. Picture a pink MacBook walking around a college campus. That's free marketing and Apple knows exactly what they're doing.

Can an iPhone Chip Actually Run a Laptop?

Okay so this is what everyone wants to know. An iPhone chip in a MacBook — that sounds bad, right? Here's the thing though. The A18 Pro's single-core performance lands between the M3 and M4. In the tasks that actually matter for everyday use — opening apps, browsing, documents — this chip trades blows with Apple's own M-series silicon. Multi-core and GPU? Roughly on par with the original M1.

Think about that for a second. The M1 MacBook Air is one of the most beloved laptops Apple ever made, and people are still using them in 2026. This budget MacBook should feel almost identical in daily use. Twenty Chrome tabs, Spotify in the background, a Google Doc open — no sweat.

Where it falls apart is if you try to use it like a Pro. Don't buy this thinking you're gonna edit 4K video in Final Cut or run Docker containers. And that 8GB of RAM — half of what the Air ships with — is the real bottleneck. Heavy multitasking is going to hit a wall.

The one genuinely impressive thing? The 16-core Neural Engine means this runs Apple Intelligence. All of it. Writing Tools, Image Playground, Genmoji, the new Siri. Same macOS, same features as a $2,500 MacBook Pro. At $699. That's actually kind of insane.

The Compromises Are Real

Apple didn't hit $699 by magic. They cut corners, and some of them are going to bother people.

The display is the compromise that's going to bother me the most personally. The MacBook Air has a gorgeous 500-nit Liquid Retina panel with P3 wide color. This thing is going LCD — think base model iPad vibes. It won't look bad, but once you've used a Retina display for any length of time, going back to a standard LCD is rough. You just notice it.

Ports are the other pain point. No Thunderbolt, probably one or two USB-C ports total. If you need to plug in a monitor, external drive, and charge at the same time — yeah, you're buying a hub. For a student who just charges overnight and goes to class? Fine. For anyone else? Annoying.

How It Stacks Up

The comparison everyone's going to make is the MacBook Air. Is saving $300 worth all those trade-offs? Let's look at it side by side.

Against Chromebooks? It's a massacre. Real OS, real apps, aluminum build, way more performance. Chromebooks are cheaper and have more ports, but in terms of what you can actually do with the machine, it's not even close.

Against the Air — that's where it gets tricky. The Air is genuinely better in every measurable way. Double the RAM, better display, Thunderbolt, MagSafe, bigger screen. It's a better laptop. Full stop. But it's also $300 more, and Amazon runs it at $849 pretty regularly, which closes the gap to $150. So the real question becomes: is that $150-$300 gap worth it to you? If you're a student on a budget, probably not. If you can swing it, the Air is the move.

March 4th — It's Happening

Apple sent out event invites today. March 4th. Gurman says the budget MacBook will be announced alongside the M5 MacBook Air, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, and possibly the iPhone 17e. Five or more products at one event — this is going to be one of Apple's biggest spring launches in a long time.

Manufacturing partner Quanta Computer is prepping an initial batch of around 2.3 million units, and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks Apple will ship 5 to 7 million of these in 2026. That would be roughly 20% of all MacBook sales. Apple isn't treating this as a side project.

The timing is smart. Schools make their biggest tech purchases between May and July, and Windows 10 lost support in October 2025 — so there are millions of aging PCs that need replacing. Apple is swooping in with a $699 Mac right when IT departments are writing purchase orders. That's not a coincidence.

Who Is This Actually For?

If you already own an M1 MacBook or newer — close this tab. Your laptop is better. This isn't an upgrade, it's an entry point.

Students are the obvious target. A real Mac for $699, probably $599 with education pricing. Compare that to the Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops schools have been buying — this thing runs circles around all of them and it'll last longer. Plus, most students are already on iPhones anyway, so the ecosystem integration just clicks.

The other group I think Apple is quietly targeting? Chromebook defectors and Windows users who've always been curious about Mac but couldn't stomach spending a grand to find out if they like it. $699 is "I'll try it" money. $999 is "I need to be sure" money. Big difference.

I could also see power users grabbing one as a beater travel laptop. Toss it in your bag, don't stress about it because it's not a $2,000 machine, use it for email and browsing on the road. The smaller screen actually works in your favor on planes.

Why This Matters More Than People Think

Most of the tech press is treating this as a footnote. "Apple makes cheap laptop" doesn't get the same clicks as a foldable iPhone or an OLED MacBook Pro redesign. But I think they're sleeping on it.

For the first time ever, there's going to be a Mac that costs less than most iPads. Apple's cheapest way into macOS has been $999 for as long as I can remember. They just cut that by 30%. That opens the door for millions of people who were never even in the conversation — students, families, small businesses, developing markets. This isn't just a laptop. It's Apple trying to grow the Mac install base in a way they haven't attempted in... honestly, maybe ever.

And it'll probably work. Aluminum build, full macOS, Apple Intelligence, the entire Apple ecosystem — all for $699. Chromebook makers and budget Windows OEMs are going to have a really hard time answering that. The 8GB RAM is the only real weak point, but macOS has always been better at memory management than Windows, so even that might not matter as much as you'd think.

I cannot wait to get my hands on this thing. March 4th. I'll have a full review the moment Apple lets me. If you're in the market for a laptop right now — especially on a budget — wait. Two and a half weeks. This could change everything.