Apple MacBook Neo Review: Worth the higher price?

Design

• We have colours!
• Classic Apple design
• Mechanical trackpad, and no backlit keys

When I think of laptops at this price, my mind goes to creaky plastic machines with countless ugly stickers, a complete lack of style, and very little obvious thought put into the design. Even the very best Chromebooks and cheap laptops are typically pretty dull to look at.

The MacBook Neo, on the other hand, doesn’t look like a cheap laptop. In fact, it just looks like any other MacBook, although maybe with a little more of a fun edge added in.

That fun edge comes from the colours the Neo comes in. Apple has sort of done colours before, although they have always been restrained – like the very light Sky Blue MacBook Air, or the not-quite-black MacBook Pro. The Neo hues are a little more punchy, especially the Citrus one I have here.

Citrus isn’t quite green, but it’s not quite yellow either.  It’s a little like the colour of a tennis ball, or maybe a Granny Smith apple. Whatever it is, I like it – and I like it even more that the keyboard has a tinge of the colour too.

I’m sure the pink model will be popular, although I would have liked it to be a bit more confident to be pink, rather than a pastel shade, and the colour-matched keyboard looks really great on the Indigo model. Then there’s silver for those who want something without the fun factor.

As a big fan of the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro, I would have liked to see that colour offered, and a more obvious green – perhaps a forest green – would have been a nice, subdued yet different option too.

This is a fully aluminium laptop, and it feels great. It’s sturdy and finished in the precise way those who have used £1000+ MacBooks will feel accustomed to. When I unboxed the Neo for the first time, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you this is Apple’s cheapest laptop going.

Something the Neo isn’t is a noticeably small laptop. Those hoping for a spiritual successor to the MacBook 12-inch might be a little disappointed. The Neo weighs the same 1.23kg as the MacBook Air M5 and is only marginally smaller overall.

There are a few sacrifices, and I will get them out of the way first, as I really don’t think any of them will be dealbreakers for the target market of this machine. Of course, all these are nice features to have – but realistically, there had to be shortcuts taken somewhere.

The biggest sacrifice, for my daily workflow at least, is the lack of a backlit keyboard. It’s a feature that’s just been a given on MacBooks for as long as I can remember, and it is odd not to have it. It makes typing in darker environments tricky, although I have found that the use of white keys does help somewhat on my Citrus model.

Another change is the trackpad. It remains excellent, far better than even those on some of the best Windows laptops, but it lacks the haptic response of a MacBook Air or Pro. This is a mechanical pad that moves when pressed, and it’s marginally less responsive as a result.

Around the side, there are two ports (one USB 3, another USB 2 – both can be used for charging) plus a 3.5mm headphone port and a small speaker. There’s no MagSafe, SD card slots or HDMI output – and no support for Thunderbolt 4 or 5. Again, all these features are welcome, but their omissions don’t feel like a dealbreaker.

While the keyboard and trackpad might be missing some tricks, they’re both still exceptionally good. I’ve reviewed countless Chromebooks and Windows laptops at this price, and the Neo has a better typing experience than I have tested – it’s not even close. The trackpad is large and integrates the same gestures as the pricier MacBook models, so you can swipe between desktops.

I have the base MacBook Neo (the £599/$599) model, and the keyboard here is marginally different to the £699/$699 version. It includes a simple Lock key rather than a Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the right side.

I’m a little disappointed that Apple chose this as a point of differentiation, as Touch ID is so useful and should really be a key feature on all machines. Not having Touch ID doesn’t remove any features; it just means you’ll be entering passwords more often or relying on Passkeys.

Screen

• Notch-free display is refreshing
• Gets quite bright
• Not as colourful as the MacBook Air

The MacBook Neo’s display ticks all the boxes I look for in a laptop of this price. It’s not the best display on a MacBook – of course it’s not – but it’s very good.

With the Neo, you get a 13-inch LCD, and unlike the MacBook Air or Pro, there’s no larger size available. Maybe we’ll get that down the road somewhere. It’s a Liquid Retina display, with a 2408 x 1506 resolution putting it above 1440p and making it nice and sharp.

It’s also the only current MacBook that doesn’t have a notch dipping into the display. I don’t mind the notch, although having a completely interruption-free screen is always going to be the better option.

It’s a great screen for video, with nice colour reproduction and great viewing angles. It supports the sRGB standard, although it lacks full support of the P3 colour gamut, so it’s not quite as colour accurate as the more expensive MacBook models. Will anyone who this laptop is aimed at care? Probably not.

We’ve reviewed loads of laptops at the price point, and they almost universally suffer from screens that struggle to go above 250/300 nits of brightness. This is fine when you’re in a well-lit room, but less so when outdoors or in particularly bright areas. 

I always had trouble using low-brightness displays in cafes, especially those with lots of natural light and uneven lighting. In my tests, the Neo can hit just below the 500 nits of brightness Apple claims, and this makes it so much more usable on the go.

Performance and Software

• The first Mac powered by an iPhone chip
• Only 8GB of memory available
• 256GB or 512GB storage

The MacBook Neo is the first Apple laptop to be powered by a chip originally designed for an iPhone. 

The A18 Pro at the heart of the laptop is still capable, so don’t let the idea of this being a phone-first processor put you off. The chip is made up of a 6‑core CPU with 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, plus a 5-core GPU and 16-core neural engine for AI tasks. It’s silent (there’s no fan here) and remains cool.

But, whichever way you look at it, this is still a ‘budget’ MacBook. While the performance has seriously impressed me in all of my tests, this is still a machine for lighter workloads – think browsing the web, working on documents and the like. 

It can edit 4K video and larger photos, but the experience isn’t perfect. Whenever I tested some of these intensive tasks in apps like Lightroom and Final Cut, things started off well – but declined quickly and became a bit of a slog. That’s hardly a surprise; this is a sub $/£600 machine that very much isn’t designed for those sorts of tasks. 

In single-core tests, the Neo trounces much of the Windows competition – and it’s not really close. This is the stat that helps the machine easily work through everyday tasks, and a key metric you should be looking for in a laptop of this price. If the single-core performance is slow, basic tasks will feel slow.

I was most surprised when comparing it to the M1 chip. The A18 Pro gets better single-core performance than Apple’s first M-series chip, so that gives a good indication of where this sits in terms of performance.

This isn’t a gaming machine, although some of the better Apple Arcade titles, like the new Oceanhorn game, are playable. 

I have been using the MacBook Neo as my main machine for the past week, replacing an M2 Pro MacBook Pro that I have used for years. In the vast majority of my daily tasks, the Neo is great. It can open multiple apps at once, like Slack, Safari, Spotify and Photos without slowing down. 

It can hold many open tabs in Chrome, but this will really depend on the sort of website you’re browsing, as some of these larger sites can really bog the system down. I use services like Canva frequently, and the Neo is great for lighter creative services like this.

Arguably, the biggest bottleneck to performance is the mere 8GB of unified memory. You can’t even upgrade this at all, as it’s the most supported by the chip. Open up multiple apps, with multiple tabs, and you’ll soon hit that 8GB. Again, this is fine for basic tasks – and adequate for the target market of the Neo, although it’s a real shame a 16GB option can’t exist.

Storage options are 256GB or 512GB, and the SSD is slower than other MacBooks. This is at least the case for my 256GB review model. Apple has been known to use faster 512GB SSDs before, so that model could change things.

The two USB-C ports on the side of the Neo look the same, but they’re not. The top one is the faster 10Gbps USB 3 port, whereas the lower one is an older USB 2 port. It’s a little strange Apple hasn’t marked them as such. Would that disrupt the clean design too much? Maybe, but USB 2 is slow for data transfer, and it can’t output to a monitor. Both can charge, though, and at the same speeds.

If you use an external monitor, the Neo supports a single monitor up to 4K 60 – so it’s no go for anyone with a dual-monitor setup.

Rounding things off, the 1080p webcam, speakers, and microphones are all good if nothing special and the WiFi standard is 6E. If you have a WiFi 7 router, you won’t be able to take advantage of the extra speeds.

Even though the Neo is powered by an iPhone chip, it runs full-fat macOS Tahoe with the same feature set as the MacBook Pro and Air. 

That includes the same apps, same (although no better) Apple Intelligence features and same updates. If an app works on an M-series Mac, it’ll work here, and I have so far not had any app compatibility issues. This isn’t a surprise; the M-series and A-series chips are built upon the same foundations.

Battery Life

• 20W plug is included, only in certain regions
• Can charge at a maximum of 30W
• All-day battery life

The most important thing to note about the battery life on the MacBook Neo is that it’s good enough to make it through an average workday. This is with multiple tabs always running in Chrome, an hour-long Zoom call, some light editing in Canva and hundreds of Slack messaging and Google Docs editing. Throughout my two weeks with the Neo, there wasn’t a single day of this sort of work that I expected the laptop to hit 0% before I logged off for the day.

Apple claims it should last for 16 hours of video streaming and 11 hours of browsing, and both of these ring true in my tests. I used the Neo on a flight from London to New York, and it lasted from takeoff to landing with plenty left to get some more work done in the taxi on the way to the hotel.

As I mentioned above, both USB-C ports can be used for charging, and they charge at the same speed. In the US, Apple ships the Neo with a 20W plug, but my review unit didn’t come with this. All versions do come with a 1.5m USB-C cable, which sadly isn’t colour-matched to the machine itself.

Instead, I used a fast 80W plug, and the laptop charged at 30W – so it’s not a huge loss that it doesn’t come with a slower plug. In my charging tests, the Neo went from 0-100% in just shy of two hours, which is quite slow. 

Should you buy it?