MacBook Neo review: Fresh-squeezed laptop

The two most important things about the MacBook Neo are these: It has a base price of $599 ($499 for education buyers), and it’s a full-fledged Mac.

The price is staggering. The lowest list price for a new Mac, ever, was $499 for the original Mac mini, which famously required you to bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. While Apple has experimented with lowering laptop prices by selling older models at a discount, and savvy shoppers have been able to find MacBook Airs on sale for $799 or even below, a new Mac laptop with a base price of $599 is a major breakthrough.

For that price, you might be suspicious that the MacBook Neo is not a real Mac. Before the product was announced—and we’ve been anticipating its arrival for more than two years—I saw a lot of speculation that this low-cost laptop would be broken in a bunch of artificial ways in order to separate it from more expensive and full-featured Macs.

So to be clear: Beyond the price, the most impressive thing about the MacBook Neo is that it is just a Mac like any other. It does all the things you’d expect a Mac to do. Yes, it’s got lesser specs than more expensive Macs, just as an M5 MacBook Air is not as powerful than an M5 Max MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s powered by a processor that was previously spotted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, which might make you suspicious that it’s some kind of baby Mac that can barely run Safari.

It’s not like that at all. It runs all the apps. If you’re patient and careful, you could use it in ways that are wildly beyond what Apple recommends. (I’ve been misusing Logic Pro as a podcast editing app for more than a decade, on devices vastly more underpowered than the MacBook Neo, and it hasn’t been a problem.) In many ways, the MacBook Neo is a remix of the M1 MacBook Air, which is a pretty incredible computer even five years after its introduction.

From the ground up

In creating the MacBook Neo, Apple could probably have upgraded the guts in the M1 MacBook Air and called it a day. But that would have sent the message to potential customers that they were buying a rehashed old product, and Apple wisely didn’t want to do that.

Instead, it built the MacBook Neo using the laptop look first introduced with the M1 MacBook Pro in 2021 and exported to the M2 MacBook Air in 2022: It’s got a flat top and bottom and curved corners, and a non-enthusiast would probably assume it was a MacBook Air if they were looking at a silver one. It weighs 2.7 pounds, just like the MacBook Air, and is roughly the same dimensions. (The Air is slightly wider and deeper, and the Neo is slightly thicker.)

The Apple logo is anodized aluminum rather than polished steel.

Apple has decided to differentiate the Neo by giving it a set of color options that include hues not generally found in other Apple laptops. Yes, there’s a standard silver that will allow the Neo to blend in with almost every other MacBook out there. Indigo is a somewhat lighter cousin to the Midnight MacBook Air, a dark blue that will satisfy those who prefer their devices to be on the darker side. The more interesting choices are blush, which adds a pink pop to the traditional silvery MacBook look, and citrus, a bright yellow gold that’s undoubtedly the most aggressive laptop color Apple has made since the days of the tangerine iBook.

Clearly, Apple expects that MacBook Neo buyers might be a bit younger and more open to their laptops expressing a bit of fun and personality. And as someone who has been advocating for Apple to embrace colors in their designs, I’m happy that this moment has come. That said, Apple remains pretty conservative with its color choices. It probably has data to back those decisions up, and may have even tested brighter colors and decided they were just too much to stare at when you’re trying to use your computer. I admit that as I write this story on a citrus MacBook Neo, I can not for a moment forget that the keyboard plane is bright yellow-gold, with a yellow-gold frame encircling the display. (It doesn’t bother me, though.)

In a nice touch, the MacBook Neo has white keys that are slightly tinted to fit the theme of the device’s color. So this citrus model’s keys are white, pushing into the yellow. It’s a very subtle and frankly unnecessary choice that shows that Apple really did sweat the details when it came to giving the Neo a proper design that makes it feel unique and part of the MacBook family, rather than some cut-rate monster built out of parts found in a bin. The Apple logo on the top has changed, too: it’s still a separate part, but made of anodized aluminum rather than polished steel, with a slightly different color shade than the rest of the device’s body. It’s a subtle difference that sets the Neo apart.

The tough choices

So how did Apple manage to build a new laptop that’s roughly half the price of the MacBook Air? It made some difficult decisions. When I talked to Apple people about the process, they were quick to emphasize that the MacBook Neo was not created by pulling features out of the MacBook Air, but was built from the ground up. Fair enough, but Apple still had to make choices that resulted in a full-on Mac laptop while reducing costs enough to sell that laptop for $599 instead of $999 or $1099.

It starts with the processor: The MacBook Neo uses an A18 Pro chip with six CPU cores (two performance, four efficiency) and five GPU cores. Yes, this is the iPhone 16 Pro processor, now put into a Mac. That would worry me more if we hadn’t spent six years watching Apple ship generations of new Macs that run on Apple silicon chips based on the very same architecture.

Apple built the M series chips because iPhone chips didn’t quite have enough juice to power a Mac. But that was then. My best guess is that the entire project of making the MacBook Neo began with the realization that Apple’s chips have become so capable, the base performance of even the MacBook Air has become so powerful, that even an A-series chip could run a Mac just fine. And they’re right, as these benchmark tests show:

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.

Of course, this laptop is a bad choice for people who need to do more with their computers. (You know who you are.) I do find it funny that at the product’s launch event in New York earlier this month, Apple representatives said several times that people seeking more power should opt for a MacBook Air instead. Remember when the MacBook Air was the compromise and the MacBook Pro was the upgrade option? (Obviously, the MacBook Pro is still there for the most demanding users.)

A lot of the technical limitations of the MacBook Neo do come from the original decision to put an iPhone chip inside. iPhones come with a single port, but Apple tried to make a one-port MacBook and it learned that was not a great idea. So Apple has done the work to put two USB-C ports on the Neo—and those ports reveal a bit more of the struggles Apple had in building this computer. Both of the USB-C ports will let you charge (which is good, because there’s no MagSafe), but only the one that’s furthest back is a fully functional USB 3 port with support for driving an external display at 4K, 60 frames per second. The closer-in USB port only offers USB 2 speeds. (The good news is that Apple has built alerts into macOS that will warn you if the device you’ve plugged into the slow port would be better off plugged into the faster one, so you won’t be transferring files slowly unnecessarily.)

Plugged into the wrong USB-C port? The MacBook Neo will warn you.

Honestly, I’m more disappointed by the fact that mismatched ports can lead to user frustration—no, not that port, the other one—than I am about the one slow USB port. I’m struggling to imagine likely scenarios where MacBook Neo users will need to use two high-speed ports at once and find themselves frustrated. Yes, only offering two ports—and needing one of them for charging—could potentially be frustrating, but we did survive with that scenario for several years with the retina MacBook Air. And I’m convinced that most users just won’t care, because they’ll just use these ports for charging and the occasional plugging in of a flash drive or projector.

The other limitation baked into the choice of the A18 Pro is that Apple only built 8GB of RAM into that chip. At the time, that was an important step forward because it conferred Apple Intelligence on iPhones, but in late 2024, Apple raised the lowest amount of RAM in a new Mac from 8GB to 16GB, and we all cheered. Welp!

More RAM is always nice, but Apple does a good job of managing memory in macOS and swapping it to disk when necessary. I’m sure there are some specific, RAM-hungry applications that will not do well on a MacBook Neo. But again, I used the Neo for days performing all sorts of normal, computery tasks with many apps open and never felt that I was running into a wall.

Apple prides itself on the quality of its displays, and as a result, the MacBook Neo’s display is good, if a little compromised. At 13.0 inches diagonal, it’s slightly smaller than the MacBook Air’s 13.6, and as a result, it’s got bigger bezels and no menu bar notch—which many users might see as a positive. It only supports the sRGB color space, not P3 wide color, and doesn’t support True Tone color adjustment—but again, these are limitations that seem worth accepting given the price of the device. The screen is good. It’s up to Apple’s standards, even though better screens are available on more expensive laptops.

Speaking of not repeating old errors, the MacBook Neo sports the familiar Magic Keyboard Apple design that’s pretty much in all of Apple’s keyboards these days. There’s no backlighting, which is understandable as a cost-saving measure but also a bit of a bummer. And the $599 model only has a lock key, while Touch ID is reserved for the $699 model with 512GB of storage. It took me no time to get used to opening the Neo and typing my password1 like I used to do in the olden days, but there’s no denying that this is an area where Apple is straining to find ways to lower the cost of the Neo.

The keyboard is coupled with a bit of a throwback: a trackpad that doesn’t sense force and vibrate with haptics, but physically depresses. It supports the full range of multi-touch gestures, and reminds me a lot of the trackpad on the original Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. Users familiar with other modern MacBook trackpads will notice the difference—a real click makes a real click noise!—but it’s entirely functional and after a few minutes I forgot that it was any different from the other trackpads I use.

Similarly, the MacBook Neo doesn’t have Apple’s latest 12MP forward-facing camera with Center Stage, but an older 1080p camera with no Center Stage support. It looks fine, in the same way that the old MacBook Air and iMac cameras were fine. They do the job, and it’s understandable why Apple saved some money here.

The speakers on the Neo are neither the four-speaker array on the current Air nor the rear-firing stereo speakers from older Airs. Instead, two speakers fire outward from slits in the sides of the laptop just to the left and right of the wrist rests below the keyboard. Once again, Apple has done a good job of making laptop speakers that sound surprisingly decent, even if they’re not up to the standards of Apple’s latest and greatest.

Welcome to the party, pal

If you do the math, the sheer number of iPhones sold every year means that most iPhone users can’t be Mac users. Most quarters, Apple claims that roughly half of the Macs it sells are going to first-time Mac buyers. Even with Mac sales at all-time highs, Apple has an enormous opportunity to sell Macs to more iPhone customers, and the MacBook Neo gives Apple access to a huge slice of the market that simply would never consider buying a laptop for $1000.

This doesn’t make the MacBook Neo a “ChromeBook killer”—the education-market dynamic is much more complicated than that, regardless. But it does put Apple up against a lot of lower-cost PC laptops that previously didn’t have to face this level of competition. And, despite all the compromises, the MacBook Neo is unmistakably an Apple product that upholds the company’s fundamental brand promise. This is not a computer anyone will be embarrassed by, but it may very well embarrass many of the laptops it’s now competing against.

It may come as a shock and disappointment for people who read websites like this one, but a lot of people (even if they have the money, which many of them do not!) just don’t prioritize computers enough to consider that a $1000 MacBook Air would ever be worth the additional cost over a $500 notebook from Hewlett-Packard. Even if the Apple device was clearly nicer, and even if it offered some nice integrations with their iPhone, at the end of the day… why buy a $1000 computer when a $500 one will do the trick?

I know, I know, all of us veteran Mac users shake our heads when we hear talk like that, but it’s true. The MacBook Neo gives Apple a fighting chance to get in front of those people at a price where they might actually consider buying a Mac, perhaps for the first time. An old boss of mine used to say, “You must be considered to be bought.” At $599, the MacBook Neo is going to be considered by a whole selection of people who have never considered a Mac before. Some of them will buy it. And what they’ll get is the full-fledged Mac experience.

I think they’ll like it.

If a Neo owner has an Apple Watch they should also be able to biometrically unlock it that way. ↩