Apple MacBook Neo Review
I’ve been pining for an Apple return to the bold laptop colors of its old iBook G3s for years. The new MacBook Neo, which comes in four colors that aren’t just black or silver, gets close to that, and does something else I’m not sure I expected. With the Neo, Apple made a $599 laptop that feels like it should cost hundreds of dollars more. And did it using, of all things, an iPhone processor.
For years, Windows laptops and Chromebooks have set an expectation that a budget laptop can be good enough to surf the web, but that if you want to do much else, well, it sucks to be you. Their compromises are immediately obvious; things like dim displays that are hard to see from any angle other than directly in front of them, or cheap-feeling plastic bodies that creak and bend under the slightest pressure. They’re underpowered and won’t last more than a few hours on a full charge. The Neo has none of these compromises; instead, it is a full-fledged, genuinely good computer, able to handle everything from casual use to some true workloads without complaint, for hours and hours.
The colors are the big, obvious difference between the Neo and any other Mac laptop. I reviewed the Blush model, which is a pink laptop that verges on lavender in some light and silver in others. It also ships in Citrus, a yellow-green model that can also look silver in some light, Indigo, a dark blue, and Silver. I wish Apple had gone harder with the lighter shades; I love the saturated colors of recent iMacs, and had hoped that with the Neo, the company would throw the same amount of caution to the wind. But hey, it’s a start, and they do look great when the light hits them just right.
Color treatment aside, the Neo is so typically Apple that it’s almost hard to believe its $599 starting price tag. It’s housed in a sturdy aluminum shell that’s half an inch thick, all closed up. The laptop opens easily if you catch one finger under the lid and lift, and when it closes, it makes a soft yet satisfying thump as the outer rubber taps the bottom case. The display barely moves when you’re typing, and neither does the body flex and bounce the way it would on a similarly cheap Windows laptop or Chromebook.
The keyboard feels great, too. The keys themselves are ever-so-slightly mushier than on my M2 MacBook Air, but this is otherwise the same keyboard, down to the Touch ID sensor in the upper right corner – at least, on the 512GB version of the Neo, which costs $100 more. (It’s just a power button on the base $599 model.) Apple gave the keys a creamy tint that, on the Blush model, shifts between light pink and off-white, depending on lighting.
The trackpad looks just like it does on other Apple laptops in recent years, but underneath, it’s fundamentally changed. It has the same multitouch gestures – a four-finger swipe cycles between desktop spaces, and swiping up with three fingers still zooms out to show you all the open windows on the current space – but it’s now mechanical, and its click has a lot more travel and thunk. Although it’s likely a cost-saving measure, Apple made sure you can still click anywhere you want, rather than only the bottom three-fourths or so like many Chromebooks and Windows laptops.
There are a number of other signs that the Neo is a budget laptop. Its display is 13 inches, versus 13.6 inches on the M2 Air, and it’s got a thicker bezel, enough so to accommodate its 1080p webcam. (A bummer? Perhaps not. Depends on how you feel about other MacBooks’ notch.) The webcam is good enough for meetings but don’t expect the realistic, saturated colors and sharp edges that iPhone selfie cameras have produced for years.
The Neo’s speakers are side-firing instead of tucked into the hinge as on the Air. They still sound remarkably good by comparison to other cheap and even midrange laptop speakers, though, with balanced sound that even has a little bass and never comes across as tinny or unreasonably neglectful of any part of the audio spectrum. They apparently support Dolby Atmos, but they produce a pretty narrow soundstage – a hoity-toity term for how spread-out the sound seems – compared to my M2 Air, and even narrower compared to the M1 Air that had speakers firing right up at you from either side of the keyboard. But whatever. This is a budget laptop; speakers usually feel like an absolute afterthought.
Being a budget laptop makes the fact that the Air only has two USB-C ports and a headphone jack (now near the front of the case’s side edge, not the back right), with no SD card slots or HDMI outputs to speak of, a lot more tolerable. While I think the Neo is quite a capable machine, folks who buy it won’t miss those things. Most won’t miss the Thunderbolt throughput that the USB-C ports on the Air are capable of either, but if they do, at least the rear-most port uses USB 3.0 and is still capable of 10Gbps throughput that can support a 4K display at 60Hz. The other is USB 2.0, so it’s slower at 480Mbps, but either port will charge at full power. Apple provides a 20W charger in the box, but the Neo will charge at up to 30W if you have a power brick that can manage it.
The MacBook Neo has a great display. It’s bright, at 500 nits, and it features a 2408 x 1506 native resolution that, at 219 pixels-per-inch, is as sharp as any other Apple laptop when viewed at its highest resolution.
Color-wise, it’s very close to as vibrant as my MacBook Air’s screen, but for one difference. Apple advertises that the Neo covers the sRGB color space, not the wider P3 of the Air. However, it still pushes 1 billion colors like a P3-covering display would, and when I picked “Display P3” in the Color Profile section under Settings, I got only very slightly duller results compared to my M2 MacBook Air using a Wide Gamut test page online with each.
To be clear, I’m telling you all of this more as trivia than anything else. See, unless you care deeply about this specific topic and have great eyes, or you work in a profession that depends on being able to see extraordinarily minor color differences, you’d never notice a difference between the default color profile of the Neo and another standard backlit MacBook Air LCD display.
That said, you won’t find OLED-level contrast and the Neo has a 60Hz display, but the same goes for the Air’s display and even the company’s $1,599 Studio Display. It even supports HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and HLG video. It’s got great contrast for an LCD panel, and its motion is nice and smooth, even if it doesn’t climb to 120Hz.
The MacBook Neo’s performance story shows just how absurdly good Apple’s smartphone chips have become. That’s especially true when considering that these are binned versions of the A18 Pro SoCs, which Apple originally put inside the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. That is to say, they feature a 6-core CPU like the 16 Pros, but a 5-core GPU – 1 fewer than the chips’ original 6-core GPUs.
Despite that, the MacBook Neo performs better on Geekbench 6 benchmarks than the 2019 Mac Pro, a computer that started at around $6,000. It’s silly, but it’s true, at least when comparing to the Mac Pro’s base specs. It’s roughly on-par with the original M1 MacBook Air, which I benchmarked for comparison. The Neo’s single-core performance outdid the M1 Air by 1,000 points in my Geekbench testing for about a 41% improvement, but the M1 Air still edged out the Neo by a few hundred points, or about 4%, in multicore performance. Meanwhile, the M2 Air scored 2655 (27.31% lower) and 10157 (25% higher) in the same single and multi-core performance tests.
In actual use, the Neo doesn’t just hum along; it’s snappy, even in the face of my day-to-day workload that usually involves dozens of tabs spread across Arc, Safari, and, sometimes, Chrome. I don’t do heavy work in Photoshop and Pixelmator – mostly just cropping, minor color editing, and layering – but the Neo handles that work just fine. I found its limits easily when editing 4K video; layering four clips with various transparency effects and cropping made playback in the editor choppy. But it’s doubtful that it had anything to do with compute limits, and everything to do with its limited memory.
In fact, RAM and storage speed are this laptop’s main choke points. Apple doesn’t offer the Neo with more than 8GB of RAM. That’s still enough for most people to do light and even medium-duty work without noticing any slowdown, but if you push it hard enough with memory-intensive tasks, the Neo will borrow from its internal SSD to make up the difference, a process called memory swap (or just “swap”).
On my M2 MacBook Air, that’s not a huge deal and I don’t always notice it. But I do on the Neo, because its SSD storage is markedly slower. Using AmorphousDiskMark, sequential reads topped out at 1714.88 MB/s, and writes at 1720.69 MB/s. That’s quite a bit more sluggish than the 2,984.08 MB/s and 3,248.16 MB/s respective highs of my M2 Air. Meanwhile, random reads peaked at 582.60 MB/s on the Neo, and 973.60 on the M2 Air. What all of that means is that the Neo will be choppier when it comes to calling things stored in swap, and noticeably slower to transfer files.
And yet, I didn’t feel like my experience using the Neo was degraded. I might have noticed when I was in swap, but it never actually slowed my work down. It never made me sit and wait for anything longer than it took for me to clock that the laptop was no longer powering through at full steam. To really bog the Neo down would take pushing it past some very reasonable limits, and at that point, you’re moving up into the $1,099-plus territory of the MacBook Air.
The Neo runs games far better than it has any right to. There aren’t a ton of MacOS-compatible AAA games to throw at it, but there are some, including Death Stranding and Resident Evil Village, both of which I tried out.
Death Stranding played the best. In the mountainous opening area of the game, I could count on a framerate between 30 fps and the mid-40s when I used Apple’s Metal upscaling, from 1440 x 810 to 1080p, with all graphics settings set as high as the game would let me. If I turned off upscaling but left other settings the same, it was still very playable, hanging around in the mid-20s. I’d expect things to get hairy in action-packed sequences, but it’s obvious that you could play the game with fairly high graphics settings from beginning to end with almost no issues.
RE Village is a lot harder on the Neo. At 1080p, sans upscaling, and with all settings at max, video lagged way, way behind the audio during in-game cutscenes as the Neo struggled to render each frame at just a few per second. With upscaling on and the right mix of settings – I turned things like Mesh and Ambient Occlusion to the max, shadow quality to mid, and kept all of the post-processing features like bloom lighting and lens flare on – framerate ranged between the low 30s and occasionally reached up to 50fps.
Throughout all of this gaming and everything else I put it through before that, the Neo only ever got a little bit warm. That’s particularly impressive when you consider that it’s a totally fanless laptop.
On its face, buying the Neo for gaming seems silly. Sure, you can play a lot of indie games and it works with lots of iPad and iPhone games. But major game studios still aren’t giving MacOS much love, despite Apple’s many overtures to them – in the form of gaming overlays, a Game Mode that prioritizes graphics performance when a game is on, and better-than-nothing controller support that lets you remap buttons, as long as your controller is fairly standard.
Still, it’s nice to know that if you do buy one, there are a few good games that’ll run on it, and run better than you’d expect – certainly better than a comparably-priced Windows laptop or even one that costs more. Heck, my (admittedly four-year-old) Samsung Galaxy Book 2 360, which was a $900 laptop when it was new, can’t handle Rez Infinite, the slightly graphically-overhauled version of the music-based, on-rails shooter that originally debuted on the Dreamcast.
According to Apple, the MacBook Neo is good for 16 hours of video streaming and as much as 11 hours of wireless web use. When used as my primary work laptop – meaning dozens of tabs at all times, two browsers, chat apps like Slack, some light Photoshop or Pixelmator, and more – I got almost exactly that. I started at about 8AM and finally plugged it in around 6:45PM as it hit 2%. That was with the display at around 75% brightness, so I’d imagine you could eke out more time if you went lower.
Even on the day I tested its gaming chops, I started with about 90% charge and got about six hours with the display at full brightness. That was an hour of regular use, an hour of gaming that chewed through around 50% of its battery life (from about 75% to about 25%), then another four hours before I had to plug it in. That makes sense – the more you put your laptop through, the less time you’ll get out of its battery. As I’m writing this on my last day of testing, it’s sitting at 27% battery after nearly five hours of working in which I pushed its limits with video editing, reckless browser tab usage, and heavy downloads.
The Neo is not quite the battery powerhouse of the MacBook Air, the current version of which Apple says will go for up to 15 hours, but it’s plenty for a full workday. Perhaps more, if you run at a lower brightness and you’re not hammering the battery the way my irresponsible tab use does.
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