GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
When the MacBook Neo arrived last month, I knew Windows laptop makers were in trouble. For $599, the Neo offers fantastic build quality and solid performance in a sleek and ultra-portable package. Windows laptops in this price range tend to be ugly, cheap-feeling, and a little slow.
Despite years of rumors, the MacBook Neo still seemed to take the Windows world by surprise. I expect proper competitors to pop up just as soon as the companies can manage, but I wanted to see what the competition in the PC space is like now.
So I asked a bunch of laptop manufacturers to send me their best answers to the MacBook Neo.
One of these is not like the others.
The MacBook Neo is a 13-inch, 2.7 pound all-aluminum laptop with an A18 Pro iPhone chip for its processor and just 8GB of RAM, starting at 256GB of (slow) storage. It costs $599 (or $499 for students and teachers), and for $100 more you get double the storage and a Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the power button. There aren’t any all-aluminum, 13-inch Windows laptops out there for $600. All of the Windows laptops I tested have MSRPs above $600 but are usually cheaper.
Asus sent a $700 Asus Vivobook 16 with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor (currently $530), Lenovo put up a $750 Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x with a Snapdragon X chip (currently $550), and Acer sent an Intel Lunar Lake Acer Aspire 14 AI, which is down from $1,050 to just $530. Dell and HP are between laptop generations and didn’t have any current models to send.
By Windows budget laptop standards, these are all good values. And on paper, they should be competitive. Each has an eight-core processor (versus six on the Neo), 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage — the slowest of which is twice the speed of the Neo’s storage.
Let’s start with the least expensive. The Asus Vivobook is a large 16-inch laptop with a dull and plasticky build. Its chassis creaks and flexes nearly anywhere you touch it. The screen is large, but anything displayed on it looks drab, dim, and slightly blurry. 1920 x 1200 resolution is passable on a 14-inch screen, but not stretched across 16 inches.
The news isn’t better elsewhere. Its trackpad makes a loud hollow sound with every click, while its keyboard feels a little mushy. Its speakers are also audibly grating, making music and podcasts sound empty. And when on a call, the 720p webcam rendered a low-res, noisy image. It often struggled with backlighting from a window behind my head, with the image going from too dark to making me look like I was on the surface of the sun.
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