As the back-to-school hordes descend on laptop retailers, this is perhaps the most important question of the season.

If you’re shopping for a laptop on a student budget this year, you may have noticed something unusual in the tech ecosystem — something that feels like a glitch in the matrix. Apple, a company famous for selling laptops that cost roughly the same as a small used hatchback, has accidentally made… a cheap MacBook.

The MacBook Neo starts at $699, or $599 with education pricing, which is the sort of number that makes long-time Mac users stare into the middle distance and whisper, “This can’t be right.”

So the question becomes: do you buy the shockingly affordable MacBook Neo, or stick with the classic budget Windows laptop brigade? Let’s break it down.

The Neo is basically Apple reaching its giant hand down from computing Mount Olympus saying, “Fine, here’s a laptop normal humans can buy.” You get the A18 Pro chip, proper macOS, great battery life, and the same aluminium build that makes the Air feel fancy even when you’re just browsing Amazon in a lecture. For everyday uni work (essays, browsing, light creative tasks) it’s brilliant.

But it is still a budget Mac. The base model has 8GB RAM, an sRGB display, and no keyboard backlight. It’s the Mac equivalent of ordering the cheapest item on the menu and pretending you didn’t want the expensive one anyway.