Even before the introduction of the MacBook Neo, Apple had a great student laptop. The MacBook Air is our current pick as the best laptop for college students. So in addition to competing against Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops, the new MacBook Neo is also going up against the MacBook Air for school laptop buyers. 

Given the large price difference between the Neo and Air, I think we’ll see tons of colorful MacBook Neos in schools by next fall. It looks like a hit for student budgets, but should you consider buying a MacBook Neo if you’re already out of school?

Let’s take a closer look at the new Neo to see what features it offers and those that are missing.

MacBook Neo vs. MacBook Air

For $599, or just $499 with Apple’s educational discount, the MacBook Neo significantly lowers the entry price for MacBook shoppers. The Neo arrives on the heels of the new M5 MacBook Air, which raises the Air’s price by $100 to $1,099. That likely puts the Air beyond many student budgets.

There’s also last year’s M4 MacBook Air to consider. It can usually be found for less than $1,000 at Amazon. Right now, it’s selling for $899. 

With M4 MacBook Air models still readily available, budget laptop shoppers have three MacBook options.

The fact that the price gap between the MacBook Neo and the discounted M4 MacBook Air is greater than that of the M4 Air and M5 Air makes a compelling case for the Neo. The Neo costs $300 less than the discounted M4 Air and $500 less than the $1,099 M5 Air. Only $200 separates the older M4 Air and the new M5 Air.

We don’t yet know how the MacBook Neo with its A18 Pro processor and 8GB of unified memory will measure up to a MacBook Air with an M4 or M5 chip and 16GB of RAM.

I can tell you right now, however, that if you’re a creator who uses photo- or video-editing apps or plan to use Apple Intelligence or run other AI workloads, a MacBook Air is the better choice for the additional GPU cores and greater memory allotment. You’re stuck with the Neo’s 8GB of RAM; the only upgrade offered for it is doubling the storage to a 512GB SSD for $100.

The Neo makes more sense as a MacBook for casual use around the house. Think of it as an oversized, nontouch iPad with an attached keyboard. It will let you browse the web, watch shows and movies, edit photos and videos you took with your iPhone, and respond to texts using a keyboard. It’s also compact and portable, with a lightweight aluminum body, and will no doubt make an easy travel companion. 

What’s missing on the Neo

The MacBook Neo’s most pleasant surprise was the size of the display. Rumors had swirled that Apple would keep costs in check in part by outfitting the Neo with a 12-inch display, so I was happy to see the Neo get a 13-inch display that’s only slightly smaller than the Air’s 13.6-inch display. Plus, it’s a Liquid Retina display with a relatively high resolution of 2,408×1,506 pixels. 

Still, a number of items that you get with the Air are missing on the Neo.

Let’s start with the input devices. The keyboard doesn’t have backlighting, which is a bummer since that shows up on even the most budget of Windows laptops and Chromebooks at this price. The basic keyboard also lacks Touch ID. You have to spend $100 on the 512GB SSD to get Touch ID, a feature I couldn’t live without on my MacBook. Also, the touchpad is mechanical and not the lovely Force Touch haptic touchpad found on the Air. 

Ports are also a downgrade. Instead of a pair of speedy Thunderbolt 4 ports, the two USB-C ports are of the slower USB 3 and USB 2 variety. And you’ll need to use one of them to charge the Neo because it doesn’t have a MagSafe connector. I really enjoy the satisfying snap when I connect my MagSafe cable and the peace of mind that comes knowing that the cable will disconnect with ease and not pull my MacBook to its doom if I trip over the cord.

The webcam can do 1080p video, as you get with the Air, but it lacks Center Stage, which pans and zooms to keep you in the middle of the frame. (It is nice that there’s no webcam notch, though.) And while you get a Liquid Retina display on the Neo, it doesn’t have Apple’s True Tone technology that uses ambient light sensors to adjust the white balance so text and images look more natural and accurate. Most people won’t miss either of these last two items.

Don’t forget the memory

For most people deciding between a MacBook Air and Neo, the biggest drawback will be the 8GB of RAM. I suspect the six-core A18 Pro will do a reasonably good job of running MacOS. It’s the RAM that makes me nervous.

In this era of RAM shortages driving up pricing, it should come as no surprise that Apple went with only 8GB of RAM on the Neo. And it makes sense why you can’t upgrade the Neo’s memory to 16GB. 

Apple charges $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB of RAM on the MacBook Air. Adding $200 to the cost of the Neo on top of the $100 charge for the 512GB (because most people wouldn’t do one without the other), and you’re suddenly looking at a price of $899 for the Neo. At that price, you’re entering MacBook Air territory. 

Unless you absolutely insist on keyboard backing, a haptic touchpad, Thunderbolt 4 or MagSafe, the decision between MacBook Neo or Air will come down to the memory. If you keep things casual, then the Neo’s 8GB of RAM will suffice. After all, up until the M3 Air, the base models had just 8GB of memory and didn’t struggle to run MacOS. Still, for heavier lifting where you’re doing some graphics or AI work — or you’re just a serious multitasker and find yourself juggling many, many apps every day — then it makes sense to spend the extra money on a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM.

from the let’s-move-your-contempt-from-civil-to-criminal dept

Of course, we’ll see what comes of this, but it’s starting to look like this administration won’t outlast this level of judicial scrutiny. It may have bullied its way past courts during Trump’s first year back in office, but now lines are being drawn. Whether or not those lines matter is an open question. But the important thing is that they’re being drawn. All the government has to do is cross them. And there’s no reason to believe it won’t.

This is not the only court drawing these lines. The administration has already been hit with hundreds of adverse rulings. Multiple courts have threatened contempt sanctions. Some courts have even begun making those threats a reality.

Trump may flood the zone, but now it’s clear the zone is willing to flood right back. Stare into the abyss, etc. Judges are done with dealing with this shady AF administration. They’re putting in the (legal) papers that Trump got mad.

This is from a recent order [PDF] handed down by a New Jersey federal court:

The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.

“Roundly rejected.” Just like prior restraint. This is active and ongoing restraint. And while it doesn’t do much to the First Amendment, it certainly does plenty of damage to other amendments dealing with the deprivation of personal liberty.

The court goes on to point out that the US Attorney for New Jersey has conceded to “violating 72 orders” issued in immigration cases handled in this jurisdiction alone. And yet, nothing changes. The US Attorney claimed the violations were “unintentional.” The court disagrees.

Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.

And:

It ends today.

Bang. Done.

This is how it goes from here. The judge says any further arrests or detentions in violation of this order will result in mandatory testimony under oath, if not actual sanctions. It’s not the best threat I’ve ever heard, but it’s still more than most courts are willing to do, even as the administration continues to pretend courts are mere nuisances, rather than an integral part of the American republic that constitutionally has as much power as the Executive Branch.

Let the judges cook.

Filed Under: dhs, doj, ice, mass deportation, new jersey, trump administration, zahid quraishi

from the the-law-breaking-admin dept

We’ve been pointing out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mandatory age verification laws for years now. To verify someone’s age online, you have to collect personal data from them. If that someone turns out to be a child, congratulations: you’ve just collected personal data from a child without parental consent. Which is a direct violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)—the very law that’s supposed to be protecting kids.

So what happens when the agency charged with enforcing COPPA finally notices this obvious problem? If you guessed “they admit the conflict and then just promise not to enforce the law,” you’d be exactly right.

The FTC put out a policy statement last week that is remarkable in what it tacitly concedes:

The Federal Trade Commission issued a policy statement today announcing that the Commission will not bring an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) against certain website and online service operators that collect, use, and disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user’s age via age verification technologies.

The FTC appears to be explicitly acknowledging that age verification technologies involve collecting personal information from users—including children—in a way that would otherwise trigger COPPA liability. If the technology didn’t create a COPPA problem, there would be no need for a policy statement promising non-enforcement. You don’t issue a formal announcement saying “we won’t sue you for this” unless “this” is something you could, in fact, sue people for.

The statement itself tries to dress this up by noting that age verification tech “may require the collection of personal information from children, prompting questions about whether such activities could violate the COPPA Rule.” But “prompting questions” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. The answer to those questions is pretty obviously “yes, collecting personal information from children without parental consent violates the rule that says you can’t collect personal information from children without parental consent.” The FTC just doesn’t want to say that part out loud, because then the follow-up question becomes: “so why are you encouraging companies to do it?”

Instead, they’ve decided to create an enforcement carve-out. Do the thing that violates the law, but pinky-promise you’ll only use the data to check the kid’s age, delete it afterward, and keep it secure. Then we won’t come after you. This is the FTC solving a legal contradiction not by asking Congress to fix the underlying law or admitting the technology is fundamentally flawed, but by deciding to selectively not enforce the law it’s supposed to be enforcing.

The honest approach would have been to tell Congress that age verification, as currently conceived, cannot be squared with existing privacy law—and that if lawmakers want it anyway, they need to resolve that conflict themselves rather than asking the FTC to pretend it doesn’t exist.

No such luck.

And boy, do they seem proud of themselves. Here’s Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection:

“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades…. Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.”

“The most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades.”

Excuse me, what?

This is the kind of statement that sounds authoritative right up until you spend thirty seconds thinking about it. Anyone with any knowledge of security and privacy knows that age verification is anything but “child protective.” It involves a huge invasion of privacy, for extremely faulty technology, that has all sorts of downstream effects that put kids at risk.

Oh, and the FTC seems proud that the vote for this was unanimous—though it’s worth noting that Donald Trump fired the two Democratic members of the FTC and has made no apparent efforts to replace them, despite Congress designating that the FTC is supposed to have five full members, with two from the opposing party. A unanimous vote among the remaining two Republicans is a strange thing to brag about.

The FTC even posted about this on X, and the response was… well, let me just show you:

If you can’t see that, the main part to pay attention to is not the tweet from the FTC itself, but the Community Note that (under the way Community Notes works, notes need widespread consensus among users to be appended to the public tweet):

Readers added context they thought people might want to know

Contrary to their claim, using age verification has numerous issues, including but not limited to:

1. Easily bypassed

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2. Risks of security data breach

3. Inaccuracies (Placing adults into underage groups, vice versa)

And many more… (sigh, I need a break).

Yeah, we all need a break.

That Community Note does a better job explaining the state of age verification technology than the FTC’s entire Bureau of Consumer Protection. It methodically lists out the problems: kids easily bypass these systems, the collected data creates massive security breach risks, and the technology produces wildly inaccurate results that lock adults out while letting kids through (and vice versa). When the consensus-driven crowdsourced fact-check on your own announcement is more informative than the announcement itself, maybe it’s time to reconsider the announcement.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the technology worked perfectly. Would mandatory age verification still be a good idea?

That still wouldn’t solve the issues with this technology and the harm it does to kids. Even UNICEF (UNICEF!) has been warning that age restriction approaches can actively harm the children they’re supposed to protect. After Australia’s social media ban for under-16s went into effect, UNICEF put out a statement that could not have been more clear about the risks:

“While UNICEF welcomes the growing commitment to children’s online safety, social media bans come with their own risks, and they may even backfire,” the agency said in a statement.

For many children, particularly those who are isolated or marginalised, social media is a lifeline for learning, connection, play and self-expression, UNICEF explained.

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Moreover, many will still access social media – for example, through workarounds, shared devices, or use of less regulated platforms – which will only make it harder to protect them.

So the actual child welfare experts are saying that age verification can backfire, push kids into less safe spaces, and should never be treated as a substitute for real safety measures. Meanwhile, the FTC is calling the same technology “the most child-protective” thing to come along in a generation and is waiving its own enforcement authority to encourage more of it.

What we have here is a federal agency that has identified a direct conflict between the law it enforces and the policy outcome it wants. Rather than grappling with what that conflict means—maybe age verification as currently conceived just doesn’t work within the existing legal framework, and for good reason—the FTC has chosen to simply look the other way. The message to companies is clear: go ahead and collect data from kids to figure out if they’re kids. We know that violates COPPA. We don’t care. We like age verification more than we like enforcing our own rules.

That’s a hell of a policy position for the agency that’s supposed to be the last line of defense for children’s privacy online.

Filed Under: age verification, coppa, ftc, think of the children

Several key tech companies signed a nonbinding pledge at the White House on Wednesday that the Trump administration claims will ensure that tech companies do not pass the cost of data centers on to consumers’ utility bills.

“Data centers … they need some PR help,” President Donald Trump said at the event. “People think that if the data center goes in, their electricity is going to go up.”

He was flanked by representatives from Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Google/Alphabet, Oracle, and Amazon.

Bipartisan anger about data centers and their potential impact on consumers’ electric bills has exploded over the past year. As the White House goes all in on AI, the pledge marks a significant salvo by the Trump administration to assure voters that they will not be affected by rising costs.

But electricity experts and industry insiders threw doubt on how much power the White House actually has to create meaningful consumer protections.

“This is theater,” says Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “This is a press release designed to make it seem like they are addressing this issue. But this issue can only really be addressed by utility regulators or Congress. The White House doesn’t really have a lot of moves here, and I don’t think the tech companies themselves are the most important parties on cost issues.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Data centers played a key role in last year’s elections in certain states, including Georgia and Virginia, and are factoring into other races playing out across the country this month. A recent poll conducted by Heatmap News shows that fewer than 30 percent of American voters would support a data center being built near where they live. A number of states have introduced moratoriums on data centers into their state legislatures this year, while others have bills that would seek to help offload the cost from the consumer to the companies building and operating the facilities.

Over the past few months, some big tech companies—including Microsoft and Anthropic—have rolled out various pledges around their data center construction and operation. These pledges follow multiple reports that the president was seeking assurances from tech companies to help take the costs of data centers off American consumers.

In late January, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that Democrats were to blame for high electricity costs and that he was “working with major American Technology Companies” to ensure “Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills.” Less than a month later, he said during his State of the Union address that he would introduce a “ratepayer protection pledge.”

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” he said. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up and, in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially then.”

The pledges made independently by key tech companies this year, and the one signed Wednesday, reiterate a lot of promises and initiatives that some tech companies have already been working on. In a blog post published by Google highlighting its commitment to the pledge, the company lists several ongoing initiatives, including investments in nuclear and geothermal energy as well as agreement frameworks with electric utilities and pledges to invest in job creation.

Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s now cruising around what has to be the world’s only vape-powered car.

Technically, anyway; some motorheads might object to calling donor vehicle [Chris] starts with a car, but the venerable G-Wiz has four wheels, four seats, lights and a windscreen, so what more do you want? Horsepower in excess of 17 ponies (12.6 kW)? Top speeds in excess of 50 Mph (80 km/h)? Something other than the dead weight of 20-year-old lead-acid batteries? Well, [Chris] at least fixes that last part.

The conversion is amazingly simple: he just straps his 500 disposable vape battery pack into the back seat– the same one that was powering his shop–into the GWiz, and it’s off to the races. Not quickly, mind you, but with 500 lightly-used lithium cells in the back seat, how fast would you want to go? Hopefully the power bank goes back on the wall after the test drive, or he finds a better mounting solution. To [Chris]’s credit, he did renovate his pack with extra support and insulation, and put all the cells in an insulated aluminum box. Still, the low speed has to count as a safety feature at this point.

Charging isn’t fast either, as [Chris] has made the probably-controversial decision to use USB-C. We usually approve of USB-Cing all the things, but a car might be taking things too far, even one with such a comparatively tiny battery. Perhaps his earlier (equally nicotine-soaked) e-bike project would have been a better fit for USB charging.

Thanks to [Vaughna] for the tip!

Educators have seen wave after wave of “innovative” solutions promise to address long-standing challenges — from personalization and engagement to college- and career-readiness — yet many issues remain stubbornly unresolved. Too often, solutions are developed and scaled without a clear understanding of how challenges show up in daily classroom experiences or how students, families and educators define the problems.

Understanding the everyday barriers that students, families, practitioners and administrators identify ensures that potential solutions — whether technological, instructional or relational — are grounded in real needs rather than assumptions.

What These Challenges Look Like in Classrooms and Systems

In Digital Promise’s co-research and co-design work with communities across the country, students and educators describe challenges that are neither new nor isolated, but reflect enduring gaps in how learning environments are designed and supported. Looking closely at how these challenges surface through our Challenge Map reveals the deep connections between instructional practice, student engagement and systems-level supports — and why tackling one without the others often falls short.

Together, these experiences shape whether students feel their learning opportunities are future-forward, adaptable to their goals, needs and circumstances, and equip them to exercise agency in their education and career journeys.

Supporting individualized learning, for example, requires systems that give educators the time, tools and structures to understand and respond to each learner’s growth. Without those conditions, personalization requires extraordinary effort — making it difficult to sustain as a routine part of instructional practice.

Similar structural challenges constrain college- and career-readiness efforts. Educators consistently pointed to the need for more holistic, student-centered pathways. One educator described the importance of a “multi-tiered career program in which students engage in self-exploration of their skills, abilities and interests” to connect learning to concrete opportunities and transferable skills they can use after high school.

Engagement, Agency and the Conditions for Learning

At the crux of learning lies student engagement — shaped by both classroom practices and the broader systems in which learning occurs. Community members and educators both highlighted that academic success depends on students’ well-being.

Students shared that learning is most meaningful when it connects to their interests and allows them to have a voice in shaping their educational experiences. Educators echoed this perspective, underscoring the importance of agency in fostering meaningful learning. As one educator reflected, ensuring educational excellence requires continually redefining educational systems in ways that “give every student access to their own version of success.”

Engagement is not simply a matter of student effort or teacher technique, but a product of the environments and systems that shape learning opportunities.

Learning Does Not Stop at the Schoolhouse Door

Students, families and educators who contributed to Digital Promise’s Challenge Map identified supports that go beyond the schoolhouse, offering insight into the social conditions shaping learning. Suggestions for home stability, physical and emotional safety, and balancing responsibilities inside and outside of school highlight how deeply schooling is intertwined with young people’s lives beyond the classroom.

Other insights were deceptively simple yet profound: One group of students suggested creating regular feedback loops in schools so they could share concerns, inform changes to physical spaces and course offerings, and shape how resources are used. Even these straightforward ideas, however, call for systemic shifts in how schools operate and how student voices are embedded in decision-making.

What It Means to Put People at the Center of Innovation

Education remains a fundamentally human endeavor. As long as the goal is to prepare young people to navigate their futures with skill, agency and well-being, the conditions and relationships that shape students’ opportunity and engagement remain essential.

At a time when education research and development (R&D) is often synonymous with emerging technologies, shifting the focus to problem-solving — driven by the perspectives of those living the challenges — expands what counts as innovation. Existing technologies may play an important role, but they should not be scaled simply because they are novel.

Rather, the starting point for innovation should be: What is the central problem that needs to be solved, for and with whom, and what are the resulting outcomes if the problem is addressed successfully? Only then should existing tools or new solution development enter into the equation. Addressing these challenges requires shifts in mindsets and power dynamics so that both students and educators learn how student voice should shape learning and curriculum.

Why Education Research and Development Needs a Systems Lens

As education R&D evolves, the field is increasingly recognizing that local district systems and community engagement have often been missing from innovation efforts. In policy and education leadership circles, there is a growing call for education R&D that strengthens young people’s futures and, by extension, the nation’s long-term economic and civic well-being.

When schools and local communities are meaningfully engaged in R&D, their perspectives consistently point to persistent challenges that require a systems-level response. These challenges are not isolated problems to be solved with standalone interventions, but signals of deeper misalignments in policies, incentives and assumptions across the education ecosystem.

Questions for Building Lasting Change

Solution developers, policymakers and funders drive change through their respective products and investments. Recognizing these challenges as persistent problems and indicators of necessary systems change, they might consider:

• How well do solutions capture the actual problems they aim to solve, rather than the technological possibilities they allow?
• To what extent do local policies and incentives support the development of solutions that center students, families, communities and educators experiencing the challenge?
• How are the perspectives of those living the challenges incorporated throughout the research, solution design and implementation process?
• How do technological solutions reflect the relational and mindset shifts required across the system?
• How can the evaluation of challenges in education take a systems approach that not only accounts for easily identifiable policies, resources, and practices but also for underlying relationships and assumptions?

Above all, lasting educational innovation depends on a shared conviction: The voices and experiences of students, families, community members and educators must shape how problems are defined and solutions are developed.