The MacBook Neo reviews are in and by all accounts, Apple’s new budget Mac is impressive, packing a lot of bang for the buck. The laptop, which comes in a 256GB configuration with no Touch ID and a 512GB version with Touch ID, is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever as well as one of its most fun, thanks to several color options.
I think the review that caught my eye first was Tyler Stalman’s. Tyler is the sort of person the MacBook Pro was built for because he works with video and high-resolution RAW photos for a living. It’s a fun video because it demonstrates just how capable the laptop is, even after Tyler had opened every app, scrolled around in his photo library, and launched a 4K project in Final Cut Pro, while every other app was still running. Amazingly, the Neo handled it all well.
Marques Brownlee came away impressed with the Neo, too, especially as a laptop for students and writers. However, Brownlee gave the computer lower marks for photographers and video editors primarily due to its lower-quality display and constrained memory.
At 9to5Mac, Chance Miller found that his writing workflow didn’t cause problems for the Neo at all:
In my use of MacBook Neo for the last six days, I’ve yet to hit the ceiling or have any performance bottlenecks. The vast majority of my job is writing, editing, and researching — all of which are served adequately by the A18 Pro’s CPU single-core performance.
I was especially interested in these details from Chance:
As I sit here writing this review, I have around 25 tabs open in Safari on MacBook Neo, as well as Music, Messages, Ulysses, Notes, Things, Mimestream, and a handful of other odds and ends running in the background. It’s not a crazy workflow by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the exact type of work MacBook Neo is designed to handle. It’s also the exact type of work most people do on their laptops.
That’s very similar to the apps I typically have open while writing. None of those apps by themselves would be hard to run on the Neo, but together that collection of apps and that many tabs open at once is impressive for a laptop running on an iPhone chipset.
Jason Snell makes a great point on Six Colors, too:
In terms of single-core performance, the MacBook Neo performs somewhere between an M3 and an M4. For multi-core and GPU, it’s more like an M1. That combination is not going to break any records, but the fact is, the vast majority of computer use by computer users will be covered by that level of power, and easily. I’ve spent days working on the MacBook Neo, writing and using the Web and browsing PDFs and playing music—you know, computer stuff—and the fact that it’s running a chip originally meant for an iPhone has not revealed itself once.
The reality is that most of us live single-core lifestyles, and for those kinds of tasks, the Neo is fine.
Finally, as Antonio Di Benedetto observed for The Verge:
The MacBook Neo is basically the M1 MacBook Air all over again. That laptop changed the game in 2020, and became the default option for just about anyone who wanted a great all-around thin-and-light laptop and could spend $1,000. The M1 Air was good enough that you could still buy a new one until last month. The Neo takes its place as Apple’s cheapest laptop, with a starting price of $599 and enough power to handle everyday tasks and last all day on a charge. It’s designed to entice students and first-time laptop buyers into Apple’s world. It will.
That’s a great perspective on the Neo. I still have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and a 2TB SSD, which is the main reason I didn’t jump on the bandwagon and buy a Neo myself. Even now, that M1 Air can handle most of my computing needs. Still, I’m hoping to take the MacBook Neo for a spin at some point to see how it handles development, podcasting, and video production for myself.
The original Air changed the game at a higher price point. At $599–$699, I expect the Neo will do the same for a whole new group of laptop buyers. The difference is that now, the game is changing at a more affordable price than ever, which opens up an even larger audience to the Mac. As we’re constantly barraged with news of rising gadget prices due to demand for memory and storage, it’s great to see Apple find a way to move the other direction with its lowest-cost Mac laptop ever.
