Name: Macbook Neo Review: Better than you Think!
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T21:34:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 53 s
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Actually $499 if you have a student discount.

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And now that I've used it for a week, not only is this really good, I think it's potentially Apple's most disruptive product in the last 10 plus years.

Not the iPhone X or the Vision Pro or some other crazy advanced super high end tech, but

Nothing in this MacBook Neo is fundamentally new or something we've never seen before.

But is this combination of things that is about to make the entire Windows and Chromebook laptop industry very nervous?

Yes, this is an entry level laptop and yes, it's running an iPhone chip, the A18 Pro.

And yes, it's meant for basic tasks, web browsing.

I even said in that original impressions video, like if you're watching a tech video on YouTube, if you're subscribed to this channel, this probably isn't meant for you.

But it turns out this Neo is better than you think.

Even better than I expected, to be honest.

The cheapest MacBook you've been able to get for the past couple years has always been a MacBook Air, which typically hovers around a thousand bucks new.

This year it got the M5 chip bump and it's $1,100 to start.

But 1,000 bucks is still pretty pricey for a laptop.

So a lot of places have continued selling older MacBook airs at discounts for years since it came out in 2020 because it's still that good.

Basically thanks to the huge leap from Apple Silicon.

For a few years now, you've been able to get into a good enough MacBook for around $600.

And not only has Apple Silicon gotten better and better all the way up till M5 that we have now, but

the iPhone chips have gotten better and better up to the point where this one is about as good as M1.

Geekbench on my MacBook Neo is over 8 and a half thousand multi core.

That's, that's right around the same as the M1 chip from that MacBook Air.

OpenCL and metal benchmarks for GPU are right around M1 numbers.

And single core is actually its strongest dimension.

Where it's even stronger, it's closer to M3.

It's right around M1 levels of performance.

This is a very capable chip, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise since it was in the iPhone 16 Pro which can literally edit 4K videos.

But it is still just crazy to see it in a Mac running Mac os.

Well, super well, especially if you use Apple's native apps.

So great single core performance generally means lightweight stuff, opens quickly, things are responsive.

All the bursty stuff is literally just like any other Mac.

Web browsing with a bunch of tabs, spreadsheets, music, emails, word processing all literally no problem, you can do them all at once.

I'll also note there is no performance mode like on M series laptops, just a low power mode that you can switch to.

Now, web browsing is slightly more interesting because on a Mac there's Safari web browsing and then there's Chromium web browsing.

So browsing in Chrome will famously fill up those 8 gigs of RAM a bit faster as you open more tabs.

But here's the thing, kind of no matter what multitasking you do, you get to filling up that RAM pretty fast, which is when it flips over to swap memory, meaning it starts to use the SSD as well for quickly accessing things.

Just like any other Apple silicon Macs do.

These drives read write around 1500 megabytes per second, so not quite as fast as the higher end machines, but

So on this laptop, 8 gigs of RAM is not a lot.

But because of swap, the same way it was on M1 MacBook Air which also had 8 gigs of memory swap, makes it generally okay for regular use.

The only thing I worry about on these laptops is as they get older and you start to fill up the ssd, then they tend to chug.

But this is definitely going to be faster than any Intel Mac, which is more than good enough for the average person.

And the crazy thing now is this is so easy for Apple.

They can just crank out millions of these chips at scale.

They already know they can because they've been making millions for the iPhone already, bringing their unit costs ridiculously low.

In fact, you know how easy it is for them.

They needed a chip to control the webcam and the speakers in their new studio display.

And so instead of spinning up some new custom silicon for that, they just threw in an A19 Pro.

They just print these things in the millions.

And yes, that means that that display has 12 gigs of RAM, which is more than this laptop.

So they get ridiculously low unit costs for these chips that's just as powerful as M1.

And then they just build a perfectly reasonable budget laptop around it.

13 inch LCD at roughly 1440p, 60Hz, 500 nits.

It's plenty bright for indoors and an excellent real clicking trackpad.

Two USB Type C ports on the side, one USB 3 and one USB 2 headphone jack in a sort of weird new place.

And a 1080p webcam that's good enough for video calls.

And then the aluminum chassis, which is really the Apple touch, it makes this the best feeling best built laptop in its price class.

There's none of that keyboard deck flex you might get from a plastic laptop.

And it also means you can open the lid with one finger with this perfectly balanced hinge.

And then they even get a little playful with the design, like these colors.

This one's called Citrus for example, which I guess actually makes perfect sense since it's basically the exact same color as lemon lime Gatorade.

The keyboard is basically exactly the same.

Same switches and everything, but minus the backlight.

And then it's this off white slightly tinted color to match the color of the aluminum.

And if you pay the hundred bucks to Upgrade to the 512GB, you get Touch ID in the corner as well instead of just a lock button.

And then the little nub feet at the bottom of the laptop are also yellow to match.

And then even out the box, the wallpaper and the software accent colors are all yellow to match your choice color.

So on the blue laptop, these are blue accents in the software and on the pink one they're pink or blush as they call it.

The battery on paper is rated to be just shy of the MacBook Air.

But the funny thing is it does that with a much smaller physical battery.

Apple correctly decided to use a cheaper, smaller lithium ion battery instead of lithium polymer.

The chip is just so ridiculously efficient and low TDP that it sips battery for the most part.

If you do a bunch of heavy stuff in a row, then it will light up the performance cores, especially at high brightness.

Then you can push through battery a bit more quickly.

It also comes with a 20 watt charger in the box because that's about all it needs.

I charge it from 0 to 100 with the included charger, it took over an hour.

But you can actually plug it into a higher power charger.

But then you're good for almost a whole day of writing and browsing, video watching, emailing, tweeting, whatever light stuff you're doing.

How good would the battery life have been if they decided to fill up the whole chassis with a battery the same size as a MacBook Air?