There's a lot to like about Apple's MacBook Neo.

It features colorful, flashy design options, with Citrus being a standout; its build quality is superbly solid, and more than anything, the laptop's $600 starting price is a surprisingly reasonable entry point into Apple's typically pricey ecosystem — in fact, its cost is so low that it seems to have caught some PC manufacturers off guard.

There's a lot of hype circling the laptop, and after using it as my main computer for the past few weeks, I understand why. For the most part, it's the real deal for a very specific type of user.

But the MacBook Neo isn't perfect. First, the laptop runs on Apple's A18 Pro chip, the same silicon that powers the last-gen iPhone 16 Pro. While Apple's A-series chips are based on the same architecture as the M-series chips typically found in modern MacBooks, there are clear limitations. Additionally, it features only 8GB of RAM, a spec that's beyond ridiculous by 2026 Windows 11 laptop standards. While macOS is less resource-intensive than Windows 11, the MacBook Neo's 8GB limit can quickly become an issue, depending on what you plan to do with the laptop. Then there's the slow SSD and USB-C port.

Still, Apple undeniably has a hit on its hands with the MacBook Neo, and it feels like a true budget laptop mostly done right. Hopefully, it will push key Windows laptop manufacturers to release laptops with similar specs that hit the same high points, while also avoiding its key issues.

About this article: Apple sent XDA the MacBook Neo for review. The company had no input on the contents of this article.

Price, specs & availability

Apple's MacBook Neo features the tech giant's A18 Pro chip, with a 6-core CPU comprising two performance cores, four efficiency cores, and a 5-core GPU. RAM starts at 8GB, followed by 256GB of storage. The laptop's 60Hz LED-backlit display features a 2408x1506 resolution and measures 13-inches, with support for HDR, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision.

There are only two USB-C ports on the MacBook Neo's right side: a USB 4 port and a USB 2 port (the MacBook Neo doesn't feature MagSafe). There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Other specs include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6, a built-in 1080p HD camera, and a dual-speaker system. The MacBook Neo is available now and starts at $600 for the base 256GB version. The 512GB model includes Touch ID and starts at $700. Colors include Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo.

For the price, the MacBook Neo is a shockingly premium-feeling laptop

I like the design even more than the MacBook Air

One of the best things about the MacBook Neo is its design. In an industry full of serious tech products that are typically gray or black, the MacBook Neo's overall aesthetic clearly doesn't take itself too seriously. There are four color options: Silver, Citrus, Blush, and Indigo. All the colors are somewhat washed out, but still intense, falling somewhere between the colorful iMac and the more subdued MacBook Air. Citrus is my favorite color, but the low-key pink Blush Apple sent me to review is cool-looking, too. These colors at least need to come to Apple's MacBook Air.

I really like that Apple matched the keyboard's colors to the body of the laptop. The keys are a bit lighter than the rest of the device, but they still give the MacBook Neo a decidedly lighthearted look compared to most Windows 11 Laptops. Additionally, the keyboard feels snappy and responsive, just like the rest of Apple's laptop lineup. The sting of the ill-fated Butterfly keyboard still hangs over every MacBook release, but thankfully, the MacBook Neo's keyboard feels solid and in line with the current MacBook Pro's keyboard (at least so far).

The MacBook Neo and MacBook Air are very close in size. The Neo is slightly thicker at 0.5-inches, but both laptops weigh the same at 2.7lbs. The full-aluminum MacBook Neo is a bit chunky and reminds me of a smaller, just-as-premium-feeling MacBook Pro, despite its notably cheaper price tag.

The MacBook Neo's screen is slightly smaller at 13-inches compared to the MacBook Air's 13.6-inches, but the size difference isn't very noticeable when you're using the laptop, unless you split the screen in half with two windows. Brightness comes in at 500 nits, which is slightly above the 300 to 400 nits that you'd typically see from similarly priced Chromebooks or Windows 11 budget laptops. In regular use, I've found the MacBook Neo's display to be plenty bright and great-looking, despite its color reproduction lagging behind the MacBook Air. Still, I found myself missing the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro's noticeably brighter display.

The MacBook Neo's screen is still an LED-backlit display, so the blacks and whites don't compare to those of an OLED display like the HP OmniBook 5 (when the OmniBook 5 is on sale, it's similarly priced to the MacBook Neo). There's also no notch in the MacBook Neo's screen. While I don't really have a problem with the MacBook Pro and Air's notch, I've grown to like the cleaner look of the MacBook Neo's screen, despite its noticeable bezels.

Who is the MacBook Neo for?

This is clearly an entry-level laptop

Apple's MacBook is for the average person, but at this point, what does that even really mean? For example, I consider myself a pretty basic Mac user. I primarily browse the internet, type a lot, and edit images in Lightroom CC and Photoshop, apps that some might consider more professional and outside the MacBook Neo's scope. I'm not building complex LLMs, editing 4K video, or playing high-end games. I thought, at least at the outset, that the MacBook Neo could work for someone like myself, so I used it for a typical workday to see how it performed.

The first issue I encountered was with Firefox. I know the browser has fallen out of favor over the last few years, but I've stuck with it because it's what I'm familiar with and because cross-platform support is integral to my workflow at XDA. Despite using the M-series build of Firefox, it was an absolute mess on the MacBook Neo and frequently ground macOS to a lag-filled halt, even with a single browser window open (at one point, it was using roughly 5GB of RAM). I quickly switched over to Safari, and the web browsing experience was far smoother. I also briefly used Chrome and found the performance comparable to Safari's.

Next up is Adobe's Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. While Adobe recommends 16GB of RAM for both apps, 8GB is listed as the minimum, which made me hopeful that the MacBook Neo could at least somewhat handle these higher-end creative apps. To my surprise, both Photoshop and Lightroom CC run fine on the MacBook Neo, even with multiple Safari windows open and several edits running simultaneously in both apps — it's wild the laptop handles both apps so well. If I really push things with a lot of AI edits in Lightroom, while also editing images in Photoshop and browsing the web in Safari, I encounter some slowdown, but with regular use where I'm not trying to push the laptop, this doesn't happen. I found this pretty surprising and downright impressive, especially given that a mobile iPhone chip powers the MacBook Neo.

At this point, you're probably screaming in your head something along the lines of, "that isn't what the MacBook Neo is for!" I hear you, but part of my testing process with laptops is trying my personal workflow, and to my surprise, the entry-level laptop handled it very well. However, Apple's and most people's vision of what the average, entry-level user is far more basic. In their eyes, the MacBook Neo's target audience uses Safari, edits images in Photos (maybe they use Canva occasionally), and listens to music on Apple Music.

They're a core Apple user who doesn't have much, if any, third-party software installed on the laptop. I tried this more constrained workflow with the only exception being swapping in Spotify for Apple Music (I'll never turn to the dark side), and the overall experience was very smooth. The only instances where I ran into problems were when I had 10+ Safari tabs running at once.

If you're this type of average user, you'll have no issues with the MacBook Neo's performance — think of the laptop as Apple's version of a very powerful Chromebook.

The budget laptop has a few key issues

Lackluster USB-C ports and a slow SSD

The MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports on its left side. While both can charge the laptop, only the USB-C 3 port is capable of connecting to an external display. If you plug your monitor into the wrong port, you'll get an alert from macOS Tahoe telling you to swap it, which is smart on Apple's part, though I would have preferred that both ports could handle a monitor.

The fact that both USB-C ports are on one side of the laptop is less than ideal, as it can complicate a docked monitor setup (the MacBook Neo can support up to one 4K/60Hz monitor). Unfortunately, both ports are pretty slow. The one closest to the laptop's hinge is USB 3, a previous-generation standard that's only capable of 10Gbps, while the other USB-C 2 port tops out at an awful 480Mbps. You can easily argue that USB 3 is fine for a budget laptop, but USB 2 shouldn't be featured on any modern device, even in the budget space. This feels like an intentional limitation on Apple's part to differentiate the MacBook Neo from the MacBook Air.

I'm also not a huge fan of the MacBook Neo's physical trackpad. It's a bit too loud for my taste, and I've found that I miss the haptic trackpads on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. On the plus side, it's just as responsive as every other MacBook trackpad, despite the MacBook Neo being a budget device. Additionally, there's no keyboard backlight. This isn't a deal-breaker, but it's the type of feature you'll miss as soon as you try using the MacBook Neo in a dark room. It's also important to note that if you want Touch ID, you'll need to shell out $700 for the upgraded MacBook Neo with a 512GB SSD (256GB of storage probably won't be enough for most people). Apple should have just included this very basic sensor in the base $600 laptop.

Then there's the question of macOS Tahoe. From a pure UI perspective, the latest version of Apple's desktop operating system isn't great. Liquid Glass might look cool occasionally, but it's downright confusing and cluttered most of the time. It's also more resource-intensive than previous versions of macOS, which isn't ideal on a laptop with only 8GB of RAM, especially since macOS Tahoe can sometimes use roughly 3GB of RAM when idle.

Of course, memory swapping, which moves temporary data from the MacBook Neo's RAM to its SSD, helps with this limitation (which is probably why my workflow went so smoothly in Safari) — but 16GB of RAM would have avoided this issue altogether. While memory swapping works well, it could further reduce the MacBook Neo's overhead as macOS becomes more resource-intensive over time.

It's also important to note that the MacBook Neo's SSD is notably slower than comparable Windows 11 laptops, with average read and write speeds of roughly 1,600 MB/s. This means that sizable downloads and file transfers will feel pretty slow. To put this in perspective, the MacBook Neo's SSD is notably slower than even the M1 MacBook Air's SSD, which is six years old. This isn't disappointing, even for a buget laptop.

For a mobile chip, these are impressive benchmarks

The A18 Pro is featured in last year's iPhone 16 Pro

The MacBook Neo isn't powered by an M-series chip specifically designed for the Mac, like the recently released M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Instead, it features Apple's A18 Pro chip, which powers the iPhone 16 Pro. It's a powerful chip that's arguably overkill for a smartphone, but given the MacBook Neo's 8GB of RAM (which, like all modern Apple laptops, you can't upgrade) and its fanless design, I was pretty skeptical of the performance claims surrounding the entry-level laptop.

Based on benchmarks, the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo is essentially equivalent to the M1 MacBook Pro, as shown by the scores below. It surpasses the M1 in single-core power at 3,032 compared to 2,561, but lags behind it in multi-core performance with 8,281 compared to 10,020. This makes sense given the A18 Pro features a 6‑core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, while the A18 is an8-core CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores. The entry-level laptop also obviously lags behind last year's M4, across the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, though this is to be expected.

The first number is single-core, while the second is multi-core.

On the battery life front, I easily got through a full workday (roughly 9 hours) that primarily involved using Safari, along with a few Google Meet calls, Spotify playing in the background, and editing the occasional photo in Photoshop and Lightroom CC. Just like any laptop, the MacBook Neo's battery drains more quickly the more resource intensive the apps you run on it are.

Should you buy the MacBook Neo?

What you're getting with the MacBook Neo is essentially a six-year-old smartphone CPU in a sleek-looking laptop body. Does that mean it won't get the job done in 2026? Not at all, but whether it's the right laptop for you depends on what you plan to do with the MacBook Neo, as well as if you fall into Apple's narrow definition of an average user.

Do you spend most of your time in Safari and also use apps like Photos to edit images? Are you a student mainly writing essays? Maybe you subscribe to Apple's Creator Studio bundle, which includes apps like Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and more, all creative apps that are optimized to run smoothly on the entry-level laptop. If that sounds like you, the MacBook Neo is a premium-feeling laptop with enough power for basic tasks that you've been waiting for. If it doesn't, you're likely better off with the far more capable MacBook Air if you're a Mac user.

However, it's important to be aware of the corners Apple has cut with the MacBook Neo, including a slow SSD, a USB-C 2 port, and of course, a measly 8GB of RAM. I can't help but feel that the inevitable A19 Pro-powered MacBook Neo will feature 16GB of RAM, making it a far more capable laptop than this first-run device.

You should buy the MacBook Neo if:

• You want a basic laptop for simple tasks.
• You appreciate sleek design.

You shouldn't buy the MacBook Neo if:

• You plan to use third-party apps outside of Apple's core ecosystem.
• You're primarily a Windows user.