The MacBook Neo
Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench scores to MacBooks. The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core. That was a comparison to the base $1,300 model MacBook with a 1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor, not the $1,600 model with a 1.2 GHz Core M. But, still — the iPhone 6S outperformed a brand-new $1,300 MacBook, and drew even with a $1,600 model. I called that “astounding”. The writing was clearly on the wall: the future of the Mac seemed destined to move from Intel’s x86 chips to Apple’s own ARM-based chips.
Here we are today, over five years after the debut of Apple’s M-series chips, and we now have the MacBook Neo: a $600 laptop that uses the A18 Pro, literally the same SoC as 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. It was clear right from the start of the Apple Silicon transition that Apple’s M-series chips were vastly superior to x86 — better performance-per-watt, better performance period, the innovative (and still unmatched, five years later) unified memory architecture — but the MacBook Neo proves that Apple’s A-series chips are powerful enough for an excellent consumer MacBook.
I think the truth is that Apple’s A-series chips have been capable of credibly powering Macs for a long time. The Apple Silicon developer transition kits, from the summer of 2020, were Mac Mini enclosures running A12Z chips that were originally designed for iPad Pros.1 But I think Apple could have started using A-series chips in Macs even before that. It would have been credible, but with compromises. By waiting until now, the advantages are simply overwhelming. You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality.
The original iPhone in 2007 was the most amazing device I’ve ever used. It may well wind up being the most amazing device I ever will use. It was ahead of its time in so many ways. But a desktop-class computer, performance-wise, it was not. Two decades is a long time in the computer industry, and nothing proves that more than Apple’s “phone chips” overtaking Intel’s x86 platform in every measurable metric — they’re faster, cooler, smaller, and perhaps even cost less. And they certainly don’t cost more.
I’ve been testing a citrus-colored $700 MacBook Neo2 — the model with Touch ID and 512 GB storage — since last week. I set it up new, rather than restoring my primary MacOS work setup from an existing Mac, and have used as much built-in software, with as many default settings, as I could bear. I’ve only added third-party software, or changed settings, as I’ve needed to. And I’ve been using it for as much of my work as possible. I expected this to go well, but in fact, the experience has vastly exceeded my expectations. Christ almighty I don’t even have as many complaints about running MacOS 26 Tahoe (which the Neo requires) as I thought I would.
It’s never been a good idea to evaluate the performance of Apple’s computers by tech specs alone. That’s exemplified by the experience of using a Neo. 8 GB of RAM is not a lot. And I love me my RAM — my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM (the most available at the time). But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.
Now, could I run up a few hundred open Safari tabs on this machine, like I do on my MacBook Pro, without feeling the effects? No, probably not. But that’s abnormal. In typical productivity use, the Neo isn’t merely fine — it’s good.
The display is bright and crisp. At 500 maximum nits, the specs say it’s as bright as a MacBook Air. In practice, that feels true. (500 nits also matches the maximum SDR brightness of my personal M1 MacBook Pro.) Sound from the side-firing speakers is very good — loud and clear. I’d say the sound seems too good to be true for a $600 laptop. Battery life is long (and I’ve done almost all my testing while the Neo is unplugged from power). The keyboard feels exactly the same as what I’m used to, except that because the key caps are brand new, it feels even better than the keyboard on my own now-four-years-old MacBook Pro, the most-used key caps on which are now a little slick.
And the trackpad. Let me sing the praises of the MacBook Neo’s trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad exemplifies the Neo as a whole. Rather than sell old components at a lower price — as Apple had been doing, allowing third-party resellers like Walmart to sell the 8 GB M1 MacBook Air from 2020 at sub-$700 prices starting two years ago — the Neo is designed from the ground up to be a low-cost MacBook.
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