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In a year when laptops became extraordinarily expensive, the MacBook Neo is a breath of fresh air. And for the average person who isn’t running AI models locally or messing around with photo or video editing, it’s a perfectly capable everyday computer.
Apple fans on a budget: The MacBook Neo is the best choice for folks who want the traditional Apple experience — that is, a premium design and a snappy, polished feel — without traditional Apple prices.
K-12 students and other younger users: The Neo can easily handle most basic tasks and comes in fun color options.
MacBook Air or Pro owners who want a backup device: Mashable’s tech editor, Timothy Beck Werth, deemed the Neo the ideal “party laptop.” That’s the laptop you use for “streaming, music, casual browsing, and retail therapy” once you’ve clocked out of work for the day, he said.
Read Mashable’s full review of the Apple MacBook Neo.
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Even after a $100 price bump this summer, the MacBook Neo is still an unrivaled value in the budget category. Most cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks have plastic components, but this little guy has the same luxe, all-aluminum build quality as any other MacBook. You miss out on extra fixings like keyboard backlighting, a haptic trackpad, and Touch ID (on the base model, at least), but you still get a pretty Liquid Retina display and great speakers. It’s a little thicker than a 13-inch MacBook Air, but it weighs the same.
The Neo’s A18 Pro processor is technically a pared-down iPhone chip, but don’t be fooled: It’s extremely impressive for a budget laptop CPU. In simple single-core workloads (web browsing, word processing), the Neo is just as fast as a last-gen M4 MacBook Air. In such scenarios, it feels snappier than most Windows laptops we’ve tried lately, including 10 that cost $2,000 or more.
The Neo lasted 14 hours and 50 minutes in our battery life benchmark. It lags behind its M-series peers there — our battery life median for MacBooks was 19 hours before it arrived — but it’s not bad for its price range. Our median for most other sub-$1,000 Windows laptops and Chromebooks is just 10.5 hours.
