MacBook Neo review: The first cheap laptop that isn’t cheap

Best Prices Today: Apple MacBook Neo

The word “cheap” is a loaded one. It usually means the price is below expectations, which raises a product’s appeal. But it’s also used as a derogatory term for something of poor quality. Sometimes, often even, the two concepts go hand-in-hand.

Apple’s MacBook Neo is far from “cheap” in the derogatory sense. On price alone, the MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price ($499 through education channels) is on that upper tier of cheap laptops in general. Maybe “affordable” or “budget” are better terms for the Neo.

Editor’s note: This review originally published on Macworld.com.

However, Apple doesn’t want you to think of the MacBook Neo in any of those terms. Though it describes the price as a “breakthrough” and says the Neo is the company’s “most affordable laptop ever,” it doesn’t use these terms to signify its place in the MacBook lineup. It’s a MacBook, and it happens to cost less than the others.

That’s an important distinction. The MacBook Neo is, in every sense, a MacBook, just like the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. It’s made with the same quality you’ve come to expect from Apple. That’s not to say there aren’t sacrifices to be made. There are, but they’re expected at this price point. It’s not a letdown; if anything, the MacBook Neo is a delight.

Overall, the MacBook Neo is an excellent choice as a general productivity computer. You’ll be able to write documents, create spreadsheets, build presentations, visit websites, check email, manage your calendar, video conference with people, and a lot more with ease on the MacBook Neo. It can also handle basic media editing and a few other more intensive tasks, though you’ll need to wait a little while longer for its chip to do all the work.

Our reviews usually evaluate MacBooks as a tool for Apple users. With the Neo, however, Apple hopes and believes a lot of people will switch from a Windows laptop, and it’s likely to be a success. This may be Macworld, which means a vast majority of our readers are Mac users, but if you’re considering switching from the PC world, please read on–I’ve written this as a Mac user, but switchers will be interested to know what Apple has done to make the Neo a proud part of the MacBook lineup.

MacBook Neo (2026): Our model’s specifications

This review covers the $599 MacBook Neo. Available in four colors, we looked at an Indigo model. Here are its specifications:

• CPU: A18 Pro with 6 cores (2 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores), 16-core Neural Engine
• GPU: 5 cores
• Memory: 8GB unified memory (60GBps memory bandwidth)
• Storage: 256GB SSD
• Display: 13-inch Liquid Retina; 2408-by-1506 native resolution at 219 pixels per inch; 500 nits brightness; 1 billion colors; sRGB color gamut
• Ports: 1 USB-C (USB 3); 1 USC-C (USB 2); 3.5mm audio
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax); Bluetooth 6
• Input devices: Magic Keyboard; Magic Trackpad
• Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)
• Dimensions: 0.50 x 11.71 x 8.12 inches (1.27 x 29.74 x 20.64 cm)
• Price (as tested): $599/£559

MacBook Neo: Design

What’s most remarkable is that Apple has been able to maintain its high standards of quality with the design and construction of the MacBook Neo. It has an all-aluminum case, created with what Apple claims is a new process that reduces waste. If there’s a difference between the aluminum used in the Neo and that of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, I can’t feel it.

The MacBook Neo certainly doesn’t seem cheaply constructed. It’s a confident laptop, just like the other MacBooks. Carrying it around, its weight feels evenly distributed, and it doesn’t feel hollow or fragile. The laptop is slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, but it weighs just as much.

For the first time since the M1 Air, the camera is stashed in the upper bezel of the laptop. MacBook Neo doesn’t have a notch, like the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. The bezels along the sides are noticeably thicker than on the other MacBooks, but they don’t give a sense of intrusion into your usable display area.

Overall, the laptop looks and feels like it belongs with the rest of the MacBook lineup. If Apple made sacrifices in this area to meet the price, it’s not clearly obvious. The color choices are Blush (pink), Citrus (green), Indigo (blue), and Silver. We got the Indigo model for review, and the colorization looks like it’s applied in the same manner as other MacBooks–it’s anodized, not painted. The color is rich and varies based on how the light hits it. The Apple logo is matte, whereas the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro have shiny logos.

The non-Silver colors are unique to this laptop, so people who follow Apple closely will instantly know it’s a MacBook Neo. (This is important to Apple users, switchers.)

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MacBook Neo: Display and camera

The 13-inch LED display (Liquid Retina, in Apple parlance) is what you might expect in an Apple budget laptop. It’s essentially a smaller version of the MacBook Air’s display–they’re both capable of 500 nits of brightness. It produces an evenly lit image; I didn’t notice hotspots or dim areas. The images and text are nice.

The MacBook Neo is missing two features found in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The first is True Tone, where the Mac can sense the ambient lighting in the room and adjust the display’s colors so the image looks consistent. The second is the lack of support for the P3 color gamut, as the Neo supports sRGB.

I bet most people considering the MacBook Neo won’t miss True Tone or even know that it’s not there. In fact, some Mac users turn it off. The missing P3 support is a bigger deal for people who do color work, because P3 is a wider color gamut than sRGB. The Neo may not be suitable for people who need color accuracy, but those people probably won’t be considering this laptop.

The MacBook Neo doesn’t have the 12MP Center Stage camera found on other Macs, iPads, and iPhones. It’s a revival of the 1080p FaceTime camera Apple introduced back in 2021. It’s not that great a camera, but putting the 12MP camera in the 1st-gen Neo would’ve been a surprise, really. The camera is capable of 1080p HD video recording, just like the 12MP Center Stage camera, so there’s that, at least.

MacBook Neo: Keyboard and trackpad

The Magic Keyboard is a lot like the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air keyboards, but it does have minor design modifications to make it fit the MacBook Neo chassis. Whatever modifications Apple made to the keys and design resulted in a slightly different feel, but it doesn’t feel like a cheap PC keyboard that’s about to break. It’s sturdy and feels like it will last.

Apple tints the keys with a matching color so that they provide some contrast to the MacBook Neo’s body. For example, on the Indigo model I tested, the keys are a shade of light blue, adding some pizazz to the laptop’s design aesthetic.

On the $599 model I tested, Touch ID was not included. I wrote a separate article detailing the importance of Touch ID, which is available if you get the $699 model (along with an SSD upgrade to 512GB). Macworld reader Brian H. pointed out to me that if you have an Apple Watch, you can use it in lieu of Touch ID for unlocking, Apple Pay, and other requests, which is a fine idea if you have an Apple Watch. If you don’t have a watch, you can buy an SE for $249 or spend an extra $100 on the $699 model, which also has twice the storage.

The Multi-Touch trackpad isn’t as robust as the one on the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. It’s a mechanical trackpad but the whole surface supports clicks, taps, and gestures unlike so-called diving board-style trackpads on similarly priced PC laptops. Plus it lacks the pressure-sensitive capabilities that Force Touch brings. It’s a sacrifice that a devoted Mac user may find hampering if they’ve incorporated those features into their workflow, but it’ll be an instand upgrade for someone switching from a cheap HP laptop.

MacBook Neo: Ports and connectivity

Apple includes two USB-C ports on the MacBook Neo, and it’s here where we get to the biggest point of contention with the laptop. The port closest to the rear of the laptop is a USB 3 port, capable of a 10Gbps data transfer rate. The port closest to the user is a USB 2 port, which supports a much slower 480Mbps rate. Charging can be done on either port, but the USB-C 2 port will take a really long time to move files.

The fact that the ports use two different flavors of USB (one being a very slow one) screams of a “cheap” move by Apple. However, John Gruber reports that this is more about the limitations of the A18 Pro chip than Apple being cheap, since the original chip and logic board were only designed for a single USB-C port with USB-3 speeds. That means that at some point during the Neo’s development, Apple decided the Neo needed two USB-C ports and had to perform some engineering magic to bring an extra port. That puts the decision into a better perspective.

The rear USB-C port is the one to use for connecting an external display. A lot of hullabaloo has been made about knowing which port is the “better” port, and it’s all much ado about nothing. Once you learn the rear port is the faster port (you’ll get a pop-up box if you use the wrong one), are you really going to unlearn that? You’re not. It would’ve been nice if both ports were USB-3 ports, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker.

There’s no Thunderbolt on the MacBook Neo, which isn’t a complaint but a matter of fact. Thunderbolt implementation is a pricier investment, so it doesn’t fit here. Wireless connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 6. The laptop also has a 3.5mm audio jack, but it lacks support for high impedance headphones, which again, won’t matter to the target audience.

MacBook Neo: Battery life

The MacBook Neo has a 36.5-watt-hour battery, which Apple says will provide up to 16 hours of video streaming or 11 hours of wireless web browsing. To test for battery life, we looped a video until the battery ran out. The display’s brightness is set to 150 nits, which is a little less than halfway on the macOS Brightness scale.

After 13 hours and 15 minutes, the battery finally ran out. That’s a lot of battery life for a little laptop. You’ll be able to use the MacBook Neo all day on its battery, if you’re only doing general productivity tasks. Doing more processor-intensive stuff has more of a toll on battery life, so if that’s what you do often, you may need to plug in towards the end of your day.

In the U.S. Apple includes a 20W power adapter and a 1.5-meter UBC-C charging cable, which is enough for charging. You can use a higher-wattage charger, of course, but MacBook Neo doesn’t support fast charging. Both the charger and the cable can also be used with other iPhones, iPads, and AirPods, though you’ll be better served with a 40W or 60W charger with more than one port.

(Apple doesn’t ship the MacBook Neo with the 20W Power Adapter in the U.K. or Europe, so purchasers there should look to our recommended MacBook chargers instead.)

MacBook Neo: Performance

The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to use an A-series chip, usually reserved for iPhones and iPads. The A18 Pro in this laptop was last used in the iPhone 16 Pro, which was discontinued in 2025.

Because the A18 Pro is a mobile chip, it’s easy to assume that it’s not able to provide the performance needed for a laptop. Missing from that narrative, however, is the fact that Apple’s A-series chips are consistently among the fastest mobile chips in the industry and can handle productivity tasks. In short, they’re extremely overpowered for a mobile phone.

Most importantly, the A18 Pro offers single-core speeds that are just a tad slower than the latest M4 chip–the type of performance used in everyday tasks. In other words, the MacBook Neo does well in the tasks it’s meant to excel at.

We use Geekbench to test the overall performance of Apple’s chips. Look at the Single CPU score. Damn, that’s impressive. This is an important gauge of performance for the general use of a Mac. When using the Neo, I never noticed any lag or slowdowns when using the laptop to surf the web, watch downloaded or streamed videos, make minor video and photo edits, or write this review.

The Multi-CPU performance is equivalent to that of the M1 chip. The A18 Pro can, say, render a 30-minute 4K video, but you’re going to wait a while longer than you would if you were using an M2 or newer chip.

The Cinebench 2024 benchmark relies on 3D rendering and graphics processing and is a lot more intensive than Geekbench. Here, the Single CPU Core result is closer to the M3, which is still quite good. Its CPU Multi-Core result is even slower than the M1.

This test uses Handbrake to convert the 4K Tears of Steel video to a 1080p H.265 file. The A18 Pro is slightly slower than an M2 chip. But it’s faster than the M1. iMovie 4K video export

The A18 Pro doesn’t do badly when exporting a 4K ProRes video from iMovie, but this isn’t really the type of task MacBook Neos are going to do a lot. More likely is an export of that file at a compression setting. We tested at the High setting, and the A18 Pro was the slowest of the group, as expected. You can still do video conversions, but as the Handbrake and iMovie tests show, you’ll need to wait for a while.

Based on the results of the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the SSD in the MacBook Neo is slow compared to the rest of the MacBook lineup. It’s one of the sacrifices made to reach the price Apple wants. This isn’t unique to Apple; you need to pay more for better SSD speed in general, whether it’s in a computer or part of an external drive.

The Geekbench Compute benchmark gauges GPU performance, and the A18 Pro matches the speed of the M1. The MacBook Neo isn’t the laptop you get if you want the best GPU performance. That’s what the MacBook Pro is for.

I don’t think anyone is buying the MacBook Neo for the purpose of playing high-end Mac games. These numbers are presented for reference than for a buying decision. Some iPhone games can be played on the Mac, though you have to deal with the way the controls are configured without touch.

If you’re thinking of using a MacBook Neo as a ClawdBot machine, you could do better, but you could do worse, too. The charted results above are with the Neural Engine; the results with the GPU are not as impressive: 7112 Quantized Score, 7005 Single Precision Score, 8279 Half Precision Score.

Should you buy the MacBook Neo?

Yes. Of course, there are caveats to that. The MacBook Neo is a great general laptop. It’s made for students, teachers, grandparents, parents, non-parents, kids, grown-ups… the list goes on. The MacBook Pro is for anyone who needs an everyday laptop.

Now, when considering the MacBook Neo for more specialized needs, you need to think about what you get for the money. You can technically do anything—content production, software development, database management, and more—but pro-level stuff pushes the Neo beyond its limits. If you’re disappointed by this, then you don’t understand the Neo’s positioning. No company makes a production-level laptop for $599.

What does the MacBook Neo offer longtime Mac users? It’s a much-needed new choice in the MacBook lineup. If you’ve felt like you’ve been overpaying for a MacBook Air because your needs just don’t need all that power, the Neo is an affordable alternative. I can see many Mac users getting a MacBook Neo as a secondary at their disposal. For example, it can be the laptop you take with you on vacation instead of your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, laptops that are more expensive to replace.

If you’re still using an Intel-based MacBook, here’s the low-cost entry point you’ve been waiting for to make the jump to Apple silicon. At $599, the MacBook Neo is a lot faster than the last fastest Intel chip used in the MacBook. Find a replacement for that Intel-only app you’ve been holding out on. Your time is worth it.

Finally, the MacBook Neo is a terrific Mac for a first timer. It’s a great way for a newcomer to realize what the Mac is all about. Dedicated Mac users stay for the macOS experience because we find the UI and its operability much more satisfying than other platforms. And until now, we were willing to pay a little more for it. Now, it’s a lot easier for people to find out what the Mac is all about. To all you newcomers, welcome to Macintosh.

Best Prices Today: Apple MacBook Neo