Apple had a busy March. The company pulled back the curtain on a fresh wave of hardware, and for once, the story wasn't just about making its expensive things slightly more expensive. This lot of releases feels different — less "here's another premium product for premium people" and more "right, let's actually let everyone in."
A Mac for the rest of us
The real eyebrow-raiser was the MacBook Neo. At $599, it's the cheapest proper Mac in living memory. To hit that price, Apple did something rather cheeky: it slotted in the A18 Pro chip — the same one sitting inside the iPhone 16 Pro — rather than one of its laptop-grade M-series processors. You won't get a backlit keyboard or buckets of RAM, but it comes in indigo and blush pink, it's built from aluminium, and it looks genuinely lovely. Students and anyone who's always found the MacBook Air a stretch will likely give it a very serious look.
The M5 chip and what it actually means
For those who need proper grunt, the M5 family brings serious artificial intelligence muscle to the table. Apple has introduced what it's calling "Super Cores" — essentially processing units built from the ground up to handle the heavy lifting that modern AI tools demand. The MacBook Air gets the M5 along with a base storage bump to 512GB, which is long overdue given how much digital clutter most of us accumulate. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, adds Thunderbolt 5 and a new "Fusion" chip layout that lets you run up to four external monitors at once — turning what is, at the end of the day, a laptop into something that can genuinely go toe-to-toe with a desktop workstation.
iPads and iPhones catching up with real life
The middle of the range got a sensible refresh rather than a dramatic overhaul. The iPad Air now runs on the M4 chip with 12GB of RAM, which closes the gap with the Pro in a meaningful way. Better still, the front camera has moved to the landscape edge — a small tweak that makes an enormous difference if you've ever tried to take a video call on a tablet and ended up looking like you're staring slightly off into the distance. The iPhone 17e, meanwhile, has finally ditched the old home button in favour of Dynamic Island and starts with 128GB of storage. The affordable iPhone now actually feels like a current iPhone.
What it all adds up to
This wasn't a round of minor speed bumps. Apple appears to be genuinely rethinking who its products are for. By bringing the MacBook Neo in at a price point that would've seemed unthinkable a few years ago, while simultaneously pushing the Pro line further into workstation territory, the company is trying to cover far more ground than it used to. The gap between "can't afford Apple" and "only Apple will do" is getting noticeably smaller — and that's rather good news for most people.