Should you upgrade your MacBook Neo for $100 to get Touch ID and more storage?
The $100 upgrade price is the only upgrade option on MacBook Neo and it gives you two features:
256GB of extra storage, for a total of 512GB.
Touch ID instead of a Lock button.
In my opinion it is well worth the upgrade for these two features. 256GB is already limiting for a MacBook, and if you take a lot of photos and videos on your iPhone, the 512GB of storage comes in handy for local storage. Even though this laptop isn’t really a “creator’s laptop” due to its lower specs, it does give people plenty of power to dabble in photo or video editing, where storage once again comes in handy. There’s also the possibility of faster read and write speeds with double the storage and better performance when your 8GB of RAM is full, forcing the computer into swap memory. We will have to wait for the teardown to see if Apple is using single or dual NAND chips but like I said previously:
If I were a betting man, I would assume the base model comes with a single NAND 256GB chip instead of dual NAND 128GB chips. You would get extra performance if you had dual 128GB chips since you have more “lanes” for data transfer and memory swap, but since this is the budget MacBook, it’s hard to tell until someone does a teardown.
Even if there was no difference in SSD speeds and performance, the price upgrade is worth it.
The second reason - Touch ID, a huge time saver when you add the cumulative amount of time you would spend either typing in your password, or hoping your “Apple Watch to Unlock” feature is going to work. Don’t get me wrong - using your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac works really well most of the time…but you need an Apple Watch. Even if you have one, the times where it doesn’t work makes it annoying to manually type your password, potentially making it a security risk if people are snooping around.
Let’s not forget about the other benefits of Touch ID:
Apple Pay.
You can easily fill usernames and passwords more securely. Without Touch ID, you simply click your username and password from iCloud Keychain to fill the field with no authentication other than when you unlocked your MacBook. In this case Touch ID is less convenient (barely), but more secure.
Passkeys - if you’re trying to login with a passkey, there’s a lot less friction with Touch ID. Simply touch and you’re in. Without Touch ID, you would have to use an iPhone or iPad and scan a QR code, adding more friction.
Apple kept the upgrade path simple with MacBook Neo, and the $100 upgrade is a no-brainer. At $699, this is still a great deal and the deal gets even better with education pricing at $599.