Apple MacBook Neo Review: Apple's bold venture into making a budget laptop hits the mark

Folks online can’t quite make up its mind about the MacBook Neo. For some, it’s Apple’s most disruptive laptop in years—a ₹69,900 ( ₹59,900 for students) machine that promises to upend the budget segment and make the Apple ecosystem accessible to a whole new audience. For skeptics, it’s a stripped-down Mac running on a year-old iPhone chip, with a measly 8GB of RAM—a curious set of compromises dressed up in aluminum. But one thing’s for certain—no one can ignore it.

Design: Still a Mac, in every sense

It’s all the name—Neo—a refresh, a new take on a familiar idea. Pull it out of the color coordinated packaging and the Neo is unmistakably an Apple device, with the distinctive aluminum chassis and rounded corners that closely resemble the current MacBook Air, yet with a slightly more compact footprint that is easier to carry around.

Colour is a big draw, with bold options like greenish citrus and pink blush, along with Apple's typical dark (‘indigo’) and light (‘silver’) options. The laptop’s keyboard, rubber feet, wallpapers and menu accents are colour-matched to the case.

The attention to detail is no less than the pricier Apple laptops, and there’s no flex or creaking that’s altogether too common for mid-range Windows laptops at this price. The Neo feels as well thought through as the Pro, right from the easy-open lid to the spacious multi-touch trackpad. The latter is miles ahead of the competition.

Even the display avoids the familiar budget laptop traps of low resolution and even lower brightness. It’s 2408x1506-pixel, with 500 nits of maximum brightness, and an LCD screen with bold colours. It does lack the wider colour gamut and True Tone auto-adjustment features from the MacBook Air though, but that is to be expected. It’s not something most folks will spot unless the Neo and the Air are placed side-by-side, but what most will instantly appreciate are the side-firing speakers, which sound significantly better and bassier than the tinny set in most budget Windows machines. Watching streaming content on the Neo is a good experience, one that I expect its target audience will be doing a lot of.

So where does Apple cut corners for its budget laptop? There’s the lack of a magnetic power connector which disconnects if someone yanks the cable. Instead, the Neo charges through USB-C, and with one USB-C 3 and the other running the slower USB-C 2 speeds, you’ll want to reserve the USB 3 port for anything that needs higher speeds, like connecting an external monitor, a USB-C hub, or external storage. Atop the 13-inch screen is a 1080p FaceTime HD camera that omits the Center Stage tracking-and-centering feature during video calls, while the Touch ID sensor for logging in via fingerprint is only available on the pricier 512GB storage model, not on the base 256GB storage model.

One glaring omission is the lack of backlights for the keyboard, which becomes an issue if you’re using the Neo in dimly lit environments. Aside from that, the keyboard is as much of a joy to use as any other Mac keyboard.

Performance: Enough for everyday needs

In the midst of an incredible run (since 2020) with the Apple Silicon M-series of chips, this is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone processor, specifically the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro with 8GB of memory and with one fewer graphics core. Regardless of which model you buy, there's no option to upgrade your MacBook Neo's memory now, or later. This is not a laptop for pro video editing or a 3D animation workflow.

That being said, one shouldn’t write off the A18 Pro and 8GB combo. The thing is, the M-series Macs provide an overkill of computing power for the average workload, and you have to make strong demands from the standard Mac to push it to its limits. The Neo is an everyday MacBook with enough firepower for streaming music and Netflix, writing emails and working on spreadsheets.

I gave my M4-powered MacBook Air a break for a week and switched over to the Neo for all of my work and entertainment. After several runs of a few dozen tabs in Safari that I would open every day for research, YouTube videos streaming in the background, chats and calls in Teams and working on some complex year-end spreadsheets in Excel, I found the experience imperceptible in terms of responsiveness.

Then I upped the ante with the same in Chrome—it’s a notorious resource hog, aside from being a hugely popular browser—and the Neo didn’t break a sweat. Battery life, though, took a bit of a hit. My typical usage would give me about 8 hours from full charge on the Neo (slightly lower when using Chrome) as opposed to 11-12 hours on the Air. Charging speeds for the Neo (20W) were glacial, though.

Bottomline, the Neo is no slouch. You can even game on this, and the Resident Evil 2 remake from the Mac App Store ran just fine, but I wouldn’t count on the Neo for my AAA title gaming needs. At a pinch, I was even able to edit a reel on Final Cut Pro without the dreaded wheel of death, even after I layered multiple full HD video clips from my iPhone and added in a bunch of layers and transitions.

It handles basic 4K video editing too, but transferring large video files seems to be its bête noire, and of course, if you really lean into it, you will hit the limits of this machine, all of which are resource limits, not software ones.

This is not a Mac Lite, nor a machine running an operating system inside a browser. You get the same full-featured MacOS as the rest of the Mac lineup, with all the benefits of that ecosystem—a seamless transition between Apple devices. What Apple did cut from the Neo is a higher refresh rate ProMotion display, M-series silicon, and a system you can configure with more memory if you want. Pick up the Neo, use it, and it’ll still largely feel like any other Mac you may have used in the past.

Verdict

So, who is the Neo for? It’s the new default MacBook for anyone who would otherwise be forced to shell out tens of thousands of rupees of extra cash for their first Mac, be it a student or a small business owner looking for a portable Mac. Sure, you can pick up Windows laptops with better specs at this price, but few would have the design and software finesse of the Neo. At the same time, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone working with AI models and heavy coding workloads, or video/photo editors looking for power and colour accuracy. Go for the Neo if you want a budget laptop done the right way, although I’d equally recommend picking up an M3 Air if you find it anywhere close to the Neo pricing.

Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator, and tweets @2shar.