India, March 10 -- Parting with Rs.69,900 now gets you a new Apple MacBook Neo, which benchmark scores suggest is closer to the M4 chip in the MacBook Air than the M1 chip in the same MacBook Air form factor. For a much lesser monetary outlay, mind you. That is exactly what Apple intended to achieve by making an A18 Pro chip, previously used in the iPhone, the beating heart of its latest laptop. As someone who started out many, many years ago on an Intel chip-powered MacBook Pro with a spinning hard drive, I have a fair view of how far an 'iPhone chip" has come. A paradigm shift in the world of laptops.

Here's a gist of the benchmark scores I mentioned earlier - the Geekbench 6 tests peg single-core performance at 3461 (MacBook Neo) vers...