- Great price
- Still feels premium
- Faster than you'd expect
- Limited to 8GB of memory
- Poor webcam
- Touch ID costs extra
The MacBook Neo is a fascinating case study in expectation management. You might not expect too much from an $899 laptop, let alone one powered by an iPhone chip. (The MacBook Neo uses an almost identical processor to the iPhone 16 Pro.) Cheaper laptops haven’t had a great track record, and it’s fair to ask questions about just how fast an iPhone chipset is going to be when powering a desktop operating system.
But after testing the MacBook Neo for just under a week, it feels like Apple has underpromised but overdelivered. You’re getting much more machine than the price and processor might suggest.
A solid baseline
Out of the box, the MacBook Neo makes a great first impression. Despite being significantly cheaper than what Apple usually charges for a laptop, it still feels like an Apple product. The aluminium finish is on par with that in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, albeit with some funner colour options. I’ve grown quite attached to the indigo hue my review came in.
Similarly, the keyboard and trackpad are still both top-tier. The typing experience on the MacBook Neo is very similar to what you’d get on any other MacBook (with a little more travel on the keys), but you miss out on the Touch ID fingerprint scanner unless you drop an extra $200 to get the 512GB model. On the trackpad front, the MacBook Neo has Apple’s first physical implementation in quite some time. While every other MacBook has a “haptic” trackpad that uses software to simulate a click, the MacBook Neo’s trackpad actually clicks. There’s a slight difference in feel, but no practical difference in usage; it still supports multi-touch gestures like a two-finger swipe to scroll.
The good news continues after you boot the MacBook Neo up. While not Apple’s best, the display is still more than nice enough, and the speakers certainly don’t sound bad (even if they can’t handle sub-bass). The real question is, however, about performance.
Despite being powered by an iPhone chipset, the MacBook Neo is more capable than you might think. It’s super snappy for day-to-day tasks, and still has enough grunt to go beyond them. The MacBook Neo isn’t being pitched as a gaming or creative powerhouse, but you can still certainly do both those things on it. While this isn’t the machine to buy if you want to work on a 100-track Dolby Atmos project in Logic or edit multiple layers of 8K video in Final Cut, the MacBook Neo will still handle the kind of creative work often associated with Mac. It isn’t just an email and spreadsheet machine.
And while the MacBook Neo isn’t being pitched as a gaming laptop or anything, it still does a better job than you might expect. I was able to play Death Stranding with similar performance to what I get on my Steam Deck. That is technically a PlayStation 4 game from 2019, but it’s still impressive given the MacBook Neo is running off an iPhone chip. And if you just want to play Balatro, you’re not going to have any issues.
If anything, the biggest limitation you’ll run into is the fact the MacBook Neo is only available with 8GB of memory. For most of my testing, this wasn’t a big issue, but my 27 Chrome tabs started to bog the machine down after I opened Photoshop. Restarting Chrome had everything running snappily again, but avid multitaskers should be mindful of this.
The MacBook Neo’s battery life is also solid. Apple promises up to 16 hours of video streaming per charge, or up to 11 hours of web browsing. Those figures are shorter than its more expensive machines, but by no means bad. In my testing, I was able to achieve around 10 hours of mixed use on a single charge, which was easily enough for a full workday. The MacBook Neo isn’t going to have you looking for a charger.
Give and take
In a way, the MacBook Neo is almost defined by what it isn’t, by what Apple has taken away to hit the $899 price point. A lot of “nice to haves” are gone. As aforementioned, there’s no Touch ID unless you pay extra, and the keyboard isn’t backlit. There’s no fast charging support, and you only get a 20W charger in the box, despite the MacBook Neo supporting charging speeds of up to 35W. Apple certainly hasn’t included any of its higher-end features like ProMotion or the option of a nano-texture display.
The port situation is also a bit lighter. You get two USB-C port and no MagSafe connector. One of the USB-C ports is rated for USB 3 speeds, while the other one is limited to USB 2. The main consequence of this is only the USB 3 port can be used for an external display. If you try to connect an external display to the wrong port, the MacBook Neo will pop up a warning.
All of the missing features are, like I said, nice to have. It is great being able to get a few hours of battery life from a quick charge when I’ve forgotten to charge my MacBook Pro, but not having fast charging on the MacBook Neo certainly isn’t the type of omission that hurts the overall proposition.
My only real qualm is the webcam quality. While Apple has greatly improved its MacBook webcams over the last few years, the MacBook Neo uses a much older “1080p” webcam. The resulting footage isn’t great, with quality degrading more in darker environments. I almost got a jump scare the first time I opened FaceTime in a dark room.
MacBook Neo - Final Thoughts
The MacBook Neo is primed to become the new default for those looking for an affordable, no-frills laptop. It may not have all the bells and whistles of Apple’s more expensive options, but it’s hard to argue with what’s on offer. The MacBook Neo nails the basics.
What’s just as important is the MacBook Neo never makes you feel like you’re the product. Cheaper laptops often ship with bloatware to subsidise the cost, and as of late, Microsoft has been cluttering Windows 11 with ads. There are even ads in the start menu now. While you can uninstall bloatware and find ways to disable the ads in Windows, but you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. Conversely, the MacBook Neo offers the same clean macOS experience as every other Apple laptop. You’re not being constantly asked to switch to Safari or subscribe to Apple Music just because you bought a cheaper machine.
The case for the MacBook Neo becomes even stronger when you compare the rest of Apple’s portfolio. $899 is half the price of what a MacBook Air with M5 starts at, or $100 cheaper than an entry-level iPad with Apple’s official keyboard case. If you can get an education discount, the MacBook Neo is even cheaper at $749. With that kind of price, there’s a clear pitch for the MacBook Neo being someone’s first MacBook, whether it’s for uni, an iPhone owner who is Mac-curious, or just anyone who needs a decent computer to do medium screen things.
With the MacBook Neo potentially expanding Apple’s addressable demographic, it very much has a strong interest in ensuring it offers the kind of experience that will have first-time owners stay in the ecosystem. In that regard, I’d say the MacBook Neo certainly delivers.
Did you like this article? Good! Why not make us a preferred source in Google? Click below, tick the box, and WhistleOut stories will show up more often when you search for related content.
Alex Choros
