Thoughts on MacBook Neo

I’ve always had a soft spot for smaller laptops. One of my favorite laptops was the anemic MSI Wind netbook that I had in 2008-2009 or so. It featured that first generation Intel Atom, a sluggish mechanical hard drive, and I upgraded it to a “whopping” 2 GB of system memory. The stock Windows XP experience, and hilariously aspirational use of Windows Vista 32-bit on it, were honestly awful. But when I installed Ubuntu on it, that little netbook became a perfect little note-taking computer for college. And not having to lug the rather hefty 2007 MacBook Pro 15” showed how portable it truly was at the time.

Enter the MacBook Neo. It’s Apple’s first real foray into a budget laptop. Even their early Intel MacBook models were still more dear to the wallet. And the MacBook Air, even as a capable entry device to the world of MacOS, still has never truly been “budget” oriented. It gives you an excellent entry into M series Apple Silicon chips but it’s still north of $1000. The Neo though? That is $599 for the base model, $499 for education. That puts it comfortably into far more hands.

That’s where mine comes in. I opted for the higher tier model with TouchID and 512 GB of storage versus the base model without TouchID and 256 GB. Given the ridiculous prices of RAM and SSDs it’s honestly almost reasonable for the $100 upgrade with the MacBook Neo. Even at $699 it’s a great little system that won’t run circles around other computers but it will hold its own performance-wise and the build quality versus similarly priced Windows and Chromebook laptops is going to be stark.

The Neo features a fully aluminum chassis and a nice, albeit downgraded compared to other Apple laptops, screen. It’s still excellent in clarity, and high resolution for to meet the Retina moniker. Though only 60Hz, the motion clarity is still very usable, even with light gaming. Which, given the A18 Pro, is also capable of doing. It won’t hold a candle to the M series chips but it’s nice enough for most games. Terraria, Minecraft, The Sims 4, all run just fine on the MacBook Neo. It can even run Cyberpunk 2077 at lower settings, a remarkable feat for a phone SOC.

The Neo’s true strength is in more of the everyday tasks which it handles with aplomb. Documents, spreadsheets, web browsing, even light video and photo editing, those are all easily doable on it, plugged in or portably. And given that the keyboard is very similar to other Macs, sans the backlight, it’s pleasant to use too. The trackpad may lack haptic feedback like other Macs but the physical click is very satisfying and the glass pad itself is as pleasant to touch as any of their other laptops. It doesn’t bend or creak or wobble. It’s sturdy and downright a pleasure to use, easily right up there with my MacBook Pro 14” with M2 Pro. That this is able to provide that level of polish for under $700 is brilliant.

Continuing with design, I did opt for the ever popular Citrus. It really is a gorgeous color, greenish-yellow that definitely pops. The keyboard itself is subtly color matched, with the keys a pale greenish yellow. Something that has been bothering me for years now is how utterly bereft of character electronics have become. Your options are largely silver, black, or white. Colors have been relegated to entry models, a trend continuing here. I’m hoping to see a paradigm shift to brighter, more interesting colors outside of phones sooner than later. Limiting that to accessories feels like such a missed opportunity and a symptom of larger issues within tech and society as a whole but that’s well beyond the scope of this article.

Back to the construction it is built with some cut corners to get the costs in check. Firstly, it’s minimally machined, instead largely extruded aluminum. That leaves it a bit bulkier but plenty durable and portable. The battery is a 56Wh affair, quite small for a laptop but plenty to cover the power-sipping A18 Pro even running full tilt. Sitting here writing in Pages with Firefox loaded in the background it is averaging about 5-6 watts even with the screen at roughly 80% brightness. It’s still perfectly usable over a day, 8-12 hours, with battery to spare. And while the stock power brick is a smaller affair, connecting it up to my larger brick to charge does garner boosted power charging. It won’t do anything wild like 100 watt charging but it will happily pull down 35 watts.

Getting back to the trackpad it’s not a haptic affair like has been present on MacBooks for years now. Instead it’s an old fashioned analog switch mounted under a rather clever balance bar under the glass that helps it feel even across the entire pad rather than having zones that sink more than others. It’s still a great solution that feels solid to use with tactile feedback that’s less complex than the haptic feedback of other MacBooks but intuitive and markedly superior to other laptops even in the $1000 or higher price range. The glass surface is still that familiar feel that I’ve come to expect from Apple laptops since they switched to glass trackpads with the first unibody units in the late 2000s. 

The keyboard is also deeply familiar. While it does lack the backlight, mechanically it feels just like typing on my MacBook Pro with M2 Pro. That is to say it has that familiar chicklet design with tiny home dots on the F and J keys and is extremely pleasant to type on as has been the case with Apple laptops for the best part of 20 years now. There keys are stable, actuate evenly regardless of where pressed, and have decent tactile feedback in the form of a solid bump at the start of travel marked by a soft bottom out. I also opted for a Japanese layout since I was ordering the more expensive model already and it, as usual, was no additional cost either monetarily or order time. That’s one area Apple also beats out their peers is the availability of other keyboard layouts being readily available and without hoops to jump through. As someone who does some typing in other languages, Japanese especially, this has been something I’ve appreciated about Apple for years now.

As for the A18 Pro, it’s perfectly cromulent for a small laptop like this. It handles writing documents and browsing the web with aplomb, and I can play a light game or two easily as well such as Terraria or Minecraft. It’s capable of doing some lighter video and photo editing but that’s not the Neo’s wheelhouse. The screen, while beautiful, isn’t as bright or accurate as the MacBook Pros. It’s also a 60 Hz unit versus the 120 Hz found in the MacBook Pros so it doesn’t feel as fluid either. It also lacks an ambient light sensor so you’ll be fiddling with brightness settings all the time. That’s not a huge deal to me as I’m rather persnickety about screen brightness anyway but it’s still something to keep in mind if you have become used to everything becoming far more automated.

Continuing with the screen it’s a 2406x1506 panel. Still IPS, still not the most responsive pixels, but plenty usable. I have it set to the 1637x1024 setting, the default highest option for “most screen”. I find that usable for my imperfect eyes while giving me more screen real estate to play with. The default, 1408x881, feels cramped to me but does look super clean. As ever, I really appreciate the resolution scaling options for Apple versus Windows or Linux. Their screens have been a priority for years and it really shows. That said, it does feel older with a lower color gamut versus their other laptops and with the larger bezels that feel more like how they looked closer to 2016 versus 2026. It’s not egregious, but it’s definitely noticeable versus the ever-shrinking bezels of mobile devices. For instance, the bezels on my 2019 Razer Blade 15” are smaller, perhaps by about 2mm, versus the Neo. I’m not bothered by it as the screen itself is so nice but, again, corners were cut to meet the price and larger bezels is one of those areas.

When it comes to the software side it uses the same MacOS 26 as any other MacBook. I find MacOS 26 to be a bit of a mixed bag. I still find it preferable to Windows 11, and by a large margin, but it’s less polished than some of the older systems. I do like the glassy look to it, something that I’ve liked since Aero with Windows Vista when that came out 20 years ago. It’s performant and snappy on the Neo, with some occasional hitching when memory is swapped to disk, something that will be more frequent given the 8 GB of RAM versus 16 GB of other systems. It’s perfectly usable, but, if you do opt for the 256 GB base model you might find higher wear if you do have more stored on it and are doing more memory intensive workloads. Right now I don’t have many files on the laptop itself but as I use it I’m sure it would do more work to keep the drive optimized if I were under 15% storage free. As for right now, I have 420 GB free of the 494 GB that is usable, plenty of room to expand in the future.

As for expansion capability, that’s one more corner that’s cut. It doesn’t have Thunderbolt or USB 4, instead the two ports are USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, both USB-C. For reference, the port closest to the trackpad is the USB 2.0 port, which I use largely for charging. You can do up to a single 5K display at 60 Hz using a dongle on the USB 3.1 port. I find it usable for hooking up an external drive, keyboard, and mouse when I need to do so. It’s largely a limitation of the A18 Pro so if you’re planning on hooking up a lot of accessories via a dock you should temper your expectations given it doesn’t have the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4 to play with, nor the ability to hook up a bunch of screens. But, for an inexpensive, highly portable, little computer? It’s perfectly capable and has capability to hook up to other devices, with Bluetooth being particularly useful for peripherals.

As for my usage, largely writing and internet work, it is absolutely fine. It works great to have it set up as a secondary station while I game or work on my main computer and turn to this for Discord, text, or what have you. There’s no hitching or stuttering when I do that and memory pressure is consistently in the green, occasionally popping into yellow, something I expected more to occur in the inverse. Even when I decide to be a bit silly and start up a game it handles it just fine. That it can run Cyberpunk 2077, and do so in a playable state, speaks volumes to the capabilities of Apple’s phone SOCs. It’s wild to me that what is essentially a 5 watt phone chip can play modern, heavily intensive games is something I would have been shocked to see even 5 years ago. Apple’s engineers should absolutely be commended for what they’ve been able to pull off with Apple Silicon. 

This is the laptop I wanted when I bought the 2017 MacBook with Core m3 chip that was painfully slow even on basic tasks. I loved the form factor of the 12” MacBook but it was, essentially, a decade ahead of its time when it came to the SOC. Intel in 2015-2017 was in a lull. They had a decade of smashing AMD after the introduction of the Core 2 line and had become complacent dominating the market. The one-two punches of AMD releasing Ryzen then Apple switching to Apple Silicon deeply affected them and they’re still struggling to find their footing even now. And that Apple now can comfortably take a phone chip, a powerful one but still a phone chip, and make a compelling laptop based around it shows just how much has changed in the world of consumer electronics. The democratization of computing has been incredible. My fear is that we might very well hit a wall given the insatiable hunger of AI and the unfathomably stupid war in the Middle East once more. Those factors make the MacBook Neo particularly desirable right now. In a world where everything has become unsustainably expensive, people are squeezed by shrinking wages, and there’s a constant looming fear of losing everything that cutting down while still wanting at least something nice makes the Neo’s popularity so obvious.

If your goal is a computer, the MacBook Neo is just that. It is a perfectly usable little computer. It’s not going to set benchmark records. It’s not going to be an editing powerhouse. But it will let you write, bank, and do your everyday tasks, even with some gaming, and do so well. It’s a delightful little machine. For me, it’s a brilliant little secondary, ultraportable computer that I can take and use anywhere while not having to worry about battery life. But, for many? As a first computer? As a primary computer for someone who just needs a basic computer? Or as a secondary little machine for random tasks? It’s a brilliant little laptop that has clearly captured the interest of students to tech enthusiasts, and everyone in between.