Pros & Cons
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- Excellent speeds for basic computing
- Impressive graphics performance
- Sharper, more colorful display than almost any budget laptop
- Premium, rigid aluminum build
- Surprisingly low price for the package
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- Limited selection of physical ports
- One USB port is USB 2.0
- No keyboard backlighting
Apple MacBook Neo Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 256 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Budget |
| Class | Ultraportable |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.5 by 11.7 by 8.1 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Apple A18 Pro (5-core) |
| Native Display Resolution | 2408 by 1506 |
| Operating System | Apple macOS |
| Panel Technology | LED |
| Processor | Apple A18 Pro |
| RAM (as Tested) | 8 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 |
| Screen Size | 13 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 15:35 |
| Variable Refresh Support | None |
| Weight | 2.7 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 6 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 6E |
We were dead wrong about Apple this time, and we couldn't be happier: Apple actually pulled it off, a 100% new, no-nonsense 13-inch MacBook for $600. Confirming lots of rumors ahead of its reveal, the MacBook Neo (starts at $599; $499 for education buyers) pairs Apple's A18 Pro processor (found in the iPhone 16 Pro of 2024) with 8GB of unified memory and up to 512GB of storage, all inside a slightly smaller MacBook chassis with fun new colors. The Neo isn't flawless (we'd tweak the laptop's ports, for one thing), but it takes many of the MacBook Air's strengths and squeezes them into a more affordable device for everyone, from students to straight-up-broke Mac fans. Poised to upend the budget-laptop market at a time everything else is just getting pricier, Apple's MacBook Neo earns an emphatic Editors' Choice award.
Configurations: A Single, Simple Upgrade Option
Starting at $599 ($499 for students), the MacBook Neo comes in a single configuration with just one upgrade option. The brain of the Neo’s operation is the A18 Pro chip. It's a six-core central processor paired with a 16-core Neural Engine coprocessor for AI tasks and an asymmetric five-core graphics unit.
These are likely A18 Pro chips that were “binned” during iPhone chip manufacturing. First introduced on iPhones, the A18 Pro originally featured six GPU cores. Producing cutting-edge chips doesn't yield 100% perfect processors every time, often resulting in chips that work but cannot fully meet the expected specifications. Binning is the process of repurposing these byproducts in devices that still work well with their reduced capability. Here, the Neo's A18 Pros could be chips with one GPU core that wasn't up to snuff.
Apple’s A18 Pro is a mobile system-on-chip (SoC) that integrates graphics, memory, and other subsystem controllers. This SoC packaging means the laptop’s 8GB of unified memory is not upgradable—it’s baked in. Changing the memory would require changing the processor, which isn’t possible here. The only choice you’ll have at checkout is to double the solid-state storage from 256GB to 512GB and, at the same time, add Touch ID to the power button for another $100. (My review configuration is the $599 starting model.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)If you’re a power user, you will see all of this as excessively restrictive, but then, this isn’t the Mac for you. (Of course, if you’re a broke Apple fan, this might be the Mac for you, regardless.)
I was legitimately surprised by the price of this upgrade, thinking the Touch ID button alone would cost as much, but the upgrades are tied together. It’s an aggressive pricing move. Is it the Touch ID for security or the doubled-up storage that compels people to throw another $100 Apple’s way? Apple is placing two bets instead of one.
Design: The Smallest (and Slightest) MacBook
The MacBook Neo is basically a smaller, more colorful MacBook Air that’s lighter on features. Apple sells it in four colors: Indigo, Blush, Citrus, and silver; the first three you may know better as dark blue, pink, and a sort of lime yellow-green. Beyond the quirky three colors, color coding is a nifty perk here. The different color schemes carry through to the keyboard, the bottom cover’s rubber feet, and many macOS interface elements, such as scroll wheels and confirmation buttons—a bit of real, nifty polish.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)This new laptop is clearly inspired by the existing MacBook design launched back in 2022, but with a bunch of tweaks. The Neo is a little thicker than the 0.44-inch MacBook Air models, at exactly half an inch thick. It weighs the same as the 13.6-inch Air, at 2.7 pounds.
Beyond this and the slightly smaller (13-inch) display, the Neo shows a few more subtle differences from Apple’s former budget laptop. I immediately noticed that the brushed finish on the Neo’s aluminum housing is more pronounced than on other MacBooks, possibly because it's made with a higher percentage of recycled materials (60%) than any Apple product to date. It’s a fuzzier, fun look.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The Neo chassis also features side-firing speakers instead of speakers beneath the keyboard, venting out slits on the left and right side that resemble SD-card slots. As noted earlier, the keyboard lacks a Touch ID power button on the base model. Finally, the webcam, mounted above the screen, doesn't have the usual MacBook "notch" cutting down into the display area—instead, the screen bezels were made a bit thicker to accommodate the lens.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)How does this all compare with its budget PC competition? None of the PC laptops we benchmarked against the MacBook Neo has a full-metal frame, and only one might be as rigid and resistant to bending. That’s the Framework Laptop 12, built to meet MIL-STD-810 durability requirements and clad in rubber bumpers. (It also starts at $200 more than the Neo and has a smaller screen.)
Not one of these laptops is as thin or light as the MacBook Neo, either, generally by around a pound and a few tenths of an inch across the board. The Snapdragon Arm-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 hews closest to the Neo in thickness, despite its much larger 15-inch screen. Meanwhile, the 12-inch Framework Laptop 12 is just a tenth of a pound heavier—the price of ruggedization.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Finally, none of these competitors comes close to the MacBook Neo on screen quality. The Neo's display is sharper than any budget 13-inch laptop's, but not quite a 1440p panel, and it shines with more than 500 nits of brightness and broad coverage of the sRGB color gamut (borne out in our testing). All of these PC laptops are stuck with 1080p or 1200p screens that don’t even come close in terms of gamut coverage.
To their credit, all of these PC laptops trounce the Neo on connectivity, if that’s critical for you. I’ll dig more into the port arrangement, display, and other features, but the spoiler is that the Neo’s connectivity suite is its biggest disappointment.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On the whole, though, the MacBook Neo is a brand-new Apple laptop that brings the usual MacBook standards for design and material quality to a remarkable new low price. You’ll likely hear or see a lot of reviews say, “Only Apple could do this,” when speaking of the MacBook Neo’s build quality and performance mix. While I don’t disagree, statements like that need context. That might be true, but if so, it’s the result of Apple’s deeply integrated positions in chip and device manufacturing, coupled with control of its entire product stack, and buoyed by its gargantuan cash reserves to weather any missteps or, ahem, supply chain upheavals.
Display and Webcam: Well Ahead of Most Budget Laptops
At first glance, the MacBook Neo’s 13-inch Liquid Retina screen doesn’t look much different from the MacBook Air’s, save for its smaller size. This IPS LED-backlit panel has a resolution of 2,408 by 1,506 pixels, which is sharper than most, if not any, budget 13-inch laptop display. While it's not quite 1440p, it's remarkable for a $599 laptop.
How did Apple pull this off? By stripping away all of the supporting features it has built up on the MacBook Air and Pro laptops over the years, like support for high dynamic range (HDR), True Tone automated color adjustment, and nano-texture anti-reflective layers. I don’t think the MacBook Neo’s audience will miss them much—I don’t after using the laptop for a few days now.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The screen shines at an impressive 516 nits in our tests, beating Apple’s own 500-nit claim, and refreshes at a standard 60Hz. The display’s only officially supported color gamut is sRGB, the standard for mainstream computers. Still, Apple’s Liquid Retina takes LED-backlit IPS to its logical conclusion, displaying up to 1 billion different colors through a panel with 10-bit color depth.
A 10-bit color depth is rare on laptop displays at this price, generally reserved for laptops much closer to $1,000 and beyond. The colors this display pumps out, despite lacking OLED or mini LED tech, are impressive. I measured 96% coverage of the sRGB spectrum in my testing.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Finally, while you won’t see any nano-texture etching option for this display (that's reserved for models like the MacBook Pros), Apple says the MacBook Neo screen has an anti-reflective coating. This coating pairs well with the screen’s high brightness to combat overcast outdoor lighting, but direct sunlight will likely still be too much for this display to fight off.
Under ordinary conditions, though, the MacBook Neo’s display is a pleasure to watch videos on, with no sign of the washed-out blacks that I find common on basic IPS panels. Apple’s Liquid Retina displays have always excelled for movies and games, and their full sRGB color coverage also helps with work like home photo editing, which the Neo is definitely capable of.
As for the notch-less webcam, it’s a 1080p FaceTime HD camera. While it lacks any additional features, namely CenterStage subject-tracking, sometimes even 1080p recording resolution is missing from PC laptop webcams at this price. So props to Apple for that.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Just remember that 1080p in streamed video rarely looks as sharp as it does in recorded video. I find the camera’s streamed image to be rather fuzzy, but Apple’s built-in video-call-enhancing features—like background blurring, lighting improvements, and background generation—help compensate a little.
Keyboard, Touchpad, and Connectivity: Solid Inputs, But a Paucity of Ports
Apple’s Magic Keyboard, used on all other MacBooks, returns here, but with keys colored to match the tone of each of the three special Neo colors. It’s a subtle touch that’s most obvious on the blue Indigo model and least pronounced on the yellow-green Citrus.
The keys feel just as slight-yet-punchy as before, but much of the keys’ typography has changed. The Tab key now just shows a symbol implying that function, rather than the word. Ditto for a few similar keys, like Return and Delete, now replaced by symbols. This change might be helpful for people who live in English-dominant countries but don’t speak the language.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)One feature cut, made to reduce the Neo's price, will smart: The keyboard lacks backlighting. Unlit keys might be a deal-breaker for some, but not many laptops have backlit keys at this price. Night owls will need to find another solution to keep typing after the sun goes down.
You’ll also notice that Touch ID is missing on this $599 review model. Yes, this is a reasonable compromise, but I’ve become spoiled by biometric logins. Regardless, biometrics can fail for reasons outside of your control, and old-fashioned passwords will always be there to pick up the slack. As noted earlier, you can get Touch ID for a $100 upcharge, along with a 512GB boot SSD.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)As for Apple’s trackpad, it remains my benchmark for all other touchpads, despite its smaller size here. My 15-inch MacBook Air's trackpad, which I use daily for work, has spoiled me, but I wouldn’t mind using this tinier version every day, either. Something I missed in my first encounter with the Neo, though: This is a traditional mechanical touchpad—not one with haptic motors. In other words, you click it down, physically, and the pad moves when you do. The haptic pads on other MacBooks give you "virtual" feedback as you click. At this price, that makes sense, and the click is barely deeper than a haptic system’s.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The MacBook Neo’s most significant demerit is its connectivity suite. The laptop contains just two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, all on its left edge, and those USB-C connections are far from Thunderbolt of any kind. The rearmost port supports the 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard, while the forward-most port supports the poky, retro 480Mbps USB 2.0 standard.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Only the rear USB-C port can serve as a video output to an external display, via DisplayPort 1.4 (it can push up to 4K resolution); either port can charge the laptop. Apple has updated macOS to let you know when you’ve connected a display to the wrong port. It will also warn you of the USB 2.0 port’s reduced speeds compared with the other one when connecting items like a drive to it. Some markings alongside the ports wouldn't have hurt, but such is the Apple way.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)I’ll admit, even for a budget laptop, this port arrangement is severely limited. Would it have been that much more expensive to just include two USB 3.2 Gen 2 connections? (I have to wonder if it's not related to some technical limitation of the A18 Pro chip.) At any rate, much of the audience for this laptop isn’t going to be all that concerned with data transfer rates and which standard their laptop’s ports are up to. At least the laptop has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6 for wireless connections.
Performance Testing: The Most Well-Rounded Budget Laptop Yet
Being Apple’s new budget darling, the MacBook Neo deserves similar competition. However, the Neo’s phone-first processor doesn’t have a direct counterpart within the laptop world. So, I’ve ignored this distinction and compared it to other similarly priced systems as a budget laptop.
First in the lineup is the Acer Aspire Go 15 (AG15-32P-39R2), a $299.99 15-inch bargain basement laptop with a baseline Intel processor. Next, I included 2025’s M4 version of the Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch ($999 to start; $1,199 as tested). The $999 base model of this laptop was often on sale for just $749 through half of 2025, so it's a look at what could have been, or what you might still find.
Framework’s hybrid 2-in-1, the Framework Laptop 12, comes next, an Intel-based PC laptop whose specs are a fair foil to counter the MacBook Neo in the education world. This laptop starts at $549 barebones or $799 pre-built, and our test configuration was $1,049. Finally, a $749.99 15-inch, Snapdragon Arm-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15, which has been on sale for less than $600, brings some comparable mainstream-Windows competition.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Because macOS does not support our usual PCMark tests, we'll dive right into our CPU-centric benchmarks. First, Maxon's Cinebench 2024 renders a complex scene using the company's Cinema 4D engine. Following that, Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
To measure a laptop's mainstream content-creation chops, we use workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators to gauge a laptop’s image-editing prowess by running various automated operations in the super-popular editor Adobe Photoshop 2024.
The MacBook Neo dealt a series of mighty blows to its budget PC competition, but that Lenovo machine’s Arm processor presented some challenges for the Apple laptop’s iPhone chip. The Neo’s A18 Pro led this pack of budget systems in single-core performance, though it faced some hearty rivals in multi-core performance. However, the Neo was the only system capable of running the Photoshop test aside from the generally superior MacBook Air.
For mainstream laptops, Arm is quickly catching up to x86 based on these benchmarks. The Lenovo laptop’s Snapdragon X chip outpaced the A18 Pro on HandBrake by a country mile, and it consistently doubled its multi-core testing speeds. For what it’s worth, however, the most common use cases for laptops like this (web browsing, video watching, word processing) generally rely on a few cores or a single core, which is where Apple’s silicon excels, including the A18 Pro.
This performance story looks quite positive for the Neo so far, but when you compare it to the 2025 MacBook Air 13-Inch, which cost just $749 at times last year and even up to early February, I feel for those who missed out. (I, for one, feel vindicated in convincing my wife to buy an M4 MacBook Air at this sale price before knowing the MacBook Neo would drop.)
Numbers like these, on top of impeccable build quality, put the MacBook Neo at the top of the budget laptop hill, but the Neo isn't done yet.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
Our graphics performance testing starts with four of UL's macOS-ready 3DMark benchmarks. Steel Nomad Light is a 1440p test without ray tracing, focusing on raw graphics rasterization, while Steel Nomad (no “Light” in its title) is more advanced. Solar Bay is where ray-tracing testing comes in, and the Wild Life Extreme test pushes Macs to their limits at 4K resolution.
We also measure gaming performance using the 2022 strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 via Steam, which we run exclusively on Macs. In the game's Battle benchmark, we run the test at Ultra and Low settings at 1080p resolution, recording the average frames per second (fps).
Finally, we’ve adopted our Cyberpunk 2077 test that we run on Windows gaming PCs to Macs, since there's now a macOS version of the game. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings usually aim to push systems fully without frame generation or resolution upscaling, using the Ultra and all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive graphics presets at 1200p and 1440p. I’ve not bothered with the Overdrive preset for this particular low-end Mac, because it is murderously demanding. I did run the test one last time at the Mac's recommended settings using the game's automated adjustment tools.
Apple’s integrated graphics processors are known for their impressive performance and efficiency, bolstering the Neo’s position among budget laptops. Even with one fewer GPU core than the original specification, the A18 Pro’s graphics outpaced every one of the budget PC makers’ systems by considerable margins.
The MacBook Air’s M-series chip kept the Neo’s A18 Pro in its rightful place throughout, of course. Total War: Warhammer 3 is already a highly demanding game, and it is almost certainly not optimized for this iPhone processor, so I wasn’t surprised by the Neo's ho-hum result on that title.
While Cyberpunk 2077 ran at slideshow-like frame rates using our Ultra testing settings, choosing the “For This Mac” setting and turning frame generation on achieved a shocking 52fps during the benchmark. While the scaled-down image was choppy and riddled with artifacts throughout, it was at least far from a slideshow, and most other budget laptops don't have frame generation capability to begin with. So kudos for making this killer-demanding AAA game marginally playable.
For gaming-curious Mac fans, the latest build of World of Warcraft works impeccably on the Neo; I observed 60fps even at native resolution and acceptable detail settings in some casual, anecotal testing. These experiences were remarkable before even getting into games designed for chips like the MacBook Neo’s.
What makes the Neo an interesting little gamer book is not so much its prowess with demanding AAA games but its access to a vast library of Apple Arcade and App Store games designed for this iPhone processor. Oceanhorn 3's vibrance takes full advantage of that colorful screen. More realistic-looking games, like NBA 2K26 Arcade Edition basketball and Gear Club Stradale sports car racing, appear crisp and run smoothly at their maximum detail and resolution settings.
As a fanless system, the Neo stayed silent throughout all performance testing, and it barely got warm after a battery of benchmarks and game testing. The A18 Pro can easily stay cool with so much thermal headroom in a 13-inch laptop's body versus a phone's enclosure.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness set to 50% and audio volume set to 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and any keyboard backlighting turned off. (The latter is not an issue with the Neo.)
To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Apple’s Macs have long had a reputation for impressive battery life compared with their PC competitors. While the MacBook Neo’s result comes within spitting distance of Apple's own claim of 16 hours of video playback, this isn't one of those 25-hour-plus MacBook battery marvels we've seen before. Still, the Neo outlasted both Intel-based laptops here by quite a bit. Nothing in the lineup compared with the Snapdragon X laptop's near-30-hour result, so look in that direction for unmatched lasting power. Note that the Neo charges with the same fabric-wrapped 20-watt USB-C charger that the iPad does—neat.
As for the display, the MacBook Neo’s screen looks to be the best in its class. While the Neo's Liquid Retina display officially supports only sRGB, it covers more of the P3 and Adobe RGB color gamuts than the other budget laptops’ screens do in the primary sRGB one. Its peak brightness was also higher than that of any other screen compared here in its price range—by a lot.