It’s been a busy week at Apple. First there was the iPhone 17e, then a refreshed iPad Air followed swiftly by souped-up MacBook Pros, and now, to finish things off, Apple has dropped the MacBook Neo, a bargain-basement laptop that can be yours for just $599. It is by some margin the cheapest laptop the company has ever made.

Seeing as this comes in bold iBook G3-like color options, sports a 16-hour battery, 13-inch Liquid Retina screen, 1080p HD webcam, and dual Spatial Audio speakers (with Dolby Atmos), all wrapped in an aluminum case that weighs just 2.7 pounds, you can well imagine that Apple is going to shift a fair few of these budget beauties.

But while the MacBook Neo has the Cupertino crowd all very pleased with themselves, and rightly so, this keenly priced laptop means there’s another product in the Apple lineup that now looks remarkably overpriced: the Apple Watch Ultra 3.

Budget Balance

You may well walk into the Apple Store on March 11 and demand a Citrus MacBook Neo (yes, get that color), and gleefully hand over six hundred bucks secure in the knowledge you’re bagging a deal, but anyone doing so can also rightfully ask themselves, “Hang on, how on Earth can Apple charge me only $599 for a new MacBook, but then demand $800 for an Apple Watch?”

Well, the answer to why the MacBook Neo is so cheap lies largely with the fact that it’s powered by Apple’s A18 Pro chip—the same processor inside the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. iPads have used Mac chips for years, but now a MacBook is running an iPhone chip. Using an iPhone chip is way cheaper, thanks to the iPhone’s enormous scale. Other savings come in the form of a mechanical (not haptic) multi-touch trackpad, a non-backlit keyboard, fewer ports, and only 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradeable).

When you try to figure out why the Ultra 3 costs so much more than the Neo, let alone its Watch siblings, things get trickier for Apple. Take a look at this official comparison page for the Apple Watch. If we allow ourselves to discount iterative improvements (brighter screen, better speakers, bigger battery, better GPS, etc) and concentrate on what you can only get on the Ultra and not on the Apple Watch 11 or Watch SE, we’re left with just these: emergency SOS via satellite, scuba diving features, a siren, and a titanium build with sapphire crystal. Now consider the Series 11 starts at $399, and the SE at $249. All boast the same S10 chip, which in 2025 wasn’t even updated over the Series 10. That’s a mighty big premium on the Ultra.

Let’s bring in some experts. They’re going to tell us we’re comparing apples with oranges here when looking at the Neo and Ultra. “They serve very different purposes, very different audiences,” says Jitesh Ubrani, research manager at IDC. “You’re essentially talking about a health device versus a general-purpose computer, right? And so the prices shouldn’t be comparable, because they do very different things.”

Told you. Thing is, I don’t think the average consumer cares about that. They do care about money, though. And they now see a bewildering price discrepancy between Apple products.

Terry White, principal worldwide design and photography evangelist at Adobe, certainly does. He has posted that the Neo now proves Apple’s iPad accessories are massively overpriced. “To get that same 256 GB storage on a base iPad, you’re at $449 (and a slower chip),” he posted. “Add the $249 Magic Keyboard Folio to match the Mac’s form factor, and you’re paying $698. We used to ask if an iPad could replace a laptop. Now the real question is: Why does replacing a laptop with an iPad cost $100 more?”

Ubrani admits that if you look at the Apple Watch SE versus the base Apple Watch versus the Ultra, “the SE arguably gives you 95 percent experience of the base, which then gives you 95 percent experience of the Ultra. But the price gap is huge between those models. Huge.” He agrees that Ultra is aimed at a group of users who will pay a lot more to have diving capabilities and a rugged design. “You charge a premium for those, simply because you can and because people will pay for it,” he says.

How many are paying this huge premium? IDC just released its Apple Watch sales estimates. In 2025, Apple supposedly shipped 41.1 million Apple Watches. “Ultra represented almost 3.5 million [of these] during the year,” Ubrani says, adding that the Ultra sales declined year over year “due to the lack of a meaningful refresh.” Still, Apple has convinced more than 8 percent of Watch buyers to hand over hundreds of dollars more for the premium model.

Balbir Singh, global smartwatch analyst at Counterpoint Research, feels Apple can almost name its price for its products, especially if those products are pricier and are already in the ecosystem. “They know the consumer mentality that eventually they will buy,” he says. “They know that they have niche adventure and athletic users that need something from Apple itself, for the Apple loyalist, the iPhone user.”

By the Numbers

Apple may be greedy here, hiking the Watch price by hundreds of dollars, but it sure isn’t stupid. It knows Garmin’s flagship dive watch hovers around $800, and it wants to lure in those potential customers. We don’t want people experiencing an alternative ecosystem, now, do we?

“They don’t want to charge so much that they lose that customer to someone else, right? An example would be Garmin,” Ubrani says. “Apple has seen what its competition is doing, and it doesn’t want to offer something noticeably cheaper. Apple has to make sure that they’re not losing customers to a rival computing platform while still being able to charge essentially as much as they can and get away with.”

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, is even more plain. “The spaceship in Cupertino isn’t gonna pay for itself,” he says. “What’s expensive in Ultra is that they are also having to spend something for the satellite connectivity. They’re charging what they can for the capability. They know they’re in a premium category where people want premium features, and they can get away with it.”

I asked Apple to comment on the pricing structure of Ultra in the Watch lineup. It wouldn’t. The company did, however, send a quote from Eugene Kim, Apple’s vice president of Apple Watch Hardware Engineering: “Apple Watch Ultra is our most advanced Apple Watch, designed to take users from sports and adventure to the rest of their life, and help them stay active, healthy, connected, and safe, wherever they are.” If Eugene said these words out loud, rather than having them written for him, I’ll eat my hat.

“The 3D-printed titanium case is an expensive case to make,” Wiens adds, “but all that doesn’t add up to the price that it’s at. It’s a very high-margin product. Electronics are getting more expensive right now because of memory and storage. But the watch doesn’t really have much memory or storage.”

Wiens also notes that the iPad Pro is exorbitant, too, costing north of $1,300 for the 13-inch model. “There are really no applications that justify an iPad that is that fast. It just makes no sense to me. Mind you, Tim Cook has a bit of a hard-on for the iPad line. I think he’s the only person who uses an iPad instead of a computer. The rest of us like a keyboard.”

Ubrani agrees Apple is making a killing on the Ultra. Since the internals are so similar, it’s likely the margins are far better than the SE or the Series 11. To make matters worse for Ultra fans, Wiens has an additional word of warning. “It’s a very expensive product that is at the high end of the obsolescence curve,” he says. Don’t expect it to last several years, as the battery will wear out. “It’s not easy to get in and replace the battery on these things.”

I happen to be on a plane as I’m writing this story. I’m sitting next to Apple’s ideal faithful. He has good hair, fashionable jeans, Nike trail runners, carries a bright orange Helly Hansen backpack, and an iPhone and AirPods. On his wrist is, perhaps inevitably, an Apple Watch Ultra.

I ask him why he went with that model compared to the base version, which is so much cheaper. Does he go diving with it? “No. I’m an ultramarathon runner, and I needed a bigger battery.” I asked when he last did an ultramarathon. “Two years ago.”