MacBook Neo Reviews
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.
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The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off. Obviously this is a cost-saving measure. But the Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel cheap in any way. You can click it anywhere you want — top, bottom, middle, corner — and the click feels right.
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The Neo has no notch. Instead, it has a larger black bezel surrounding the entire display than do the MacBook Airs and Pros. I consider this an advantage for the Neo, not a disadvantage.
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The Neo crystallizes the post-Jony Ive Apple. The MacBook “One” was a design statement, and a much-beloved semi-premium product for a relatively small audience. The Neo is a mass-market device that was conceived of, designed, and engineered to expand the Mac user base to a larger audience. It’s a design statement too, but of a different sort — emphasizing practicality above all else. It’s just a goddamn lovely tool, and fun too.
It is not a perfect product. That’s what’s good about it. It’s a product borne of a mature and confident knowledge of the usual standards, and respectfully considering how a different set of circumstances could affect those standards. Without huffiness, belittling and drama, with humor, with heart, with empathy. More of that, please.
I bring this up because, of course, the MacBook Neo is able to run all of your professional apps, and I’m glad Tyler Stallman showed this off in his video. Consider how much faster the MacBook Neo must be than a 2012 Mac mini, and tell me that you can’t do awesome, creative work on this thing.
Beyond the price, the most impressive thing about the MacBook Neo is that it is just a Mac like any other. It does all the things you’d expect a Mac to do.
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It runs all the apps. If you’re patient and careful, you could use it in ways that are wildly beyond what Apple recommends. (I’ve been misusing Logic Pro as a podcast editing app for more than a decade, on devices vastly more underpowered than the MacBook Neo, and it hasn’t been a problem.)
Some good news: I don’t know if Apple had a change of heart or what, but you can enable Xcode’s intelligence features on the MacBook Neo with 8GB RAM, including ChatGPT and Codex support. Previously, this was limited to 16GB devices — I have no idea when that switch happened? 😯
[We] picked one up to take a look at the new machine and share some first impressions.
The first reviews of the MacBook Neo were published today by selected publications and YouTube channels, ahead of the laptop launching on Wednesday.
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The big question: is just 8GB of RAM enough? Most reviewers say yes.
The Verge today showed the MacBook Neo had up to 8× slower sustained SSD read and write speeds in a benchmark test compared to the new MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.
I used Magic Disk Benchmark to test the read and write speeds of the 3 Macs I have access to (and can install a random disk app on, aka not my M5 Pro work Mac). As you can see, there’s a pretty enormous gap between the Neo and even a base M2 Mac mini.
Today the MacBook Neo arrives in users’ hands, and in his review, MKBHD says it’s potentially “Apple’s most disruptive product” in the last 10+ years.
Here’s the thing: if you are running Big Data workloads on your laptop every day, you probably shouldn’t get the MacBook Neo. Yes, DuckDB runs on it, and can handle a lot of data by leveraging out-of-core processing. But the MacBook Neo’s disk I/O is lackluster compared to the Air and Pro models (about 1.5 GB/s compared to 3–6 GB/s), and the 8 GB memory will be limiting in the long run.
One reason why I’ve been so curious about Apple’s long-rumored budget MacBook was because it would be really, really nice to have something close to $500 that a person could just go out and buy without having to worry about whether they were getting the right thing (you wouldn’t want to mistake the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-32P-C0Z2 for the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-71P-59PZ, would you??), or whether it would be available at all. Something with Apple’s typical warranty support and network of retail stores behind it. And something that would integrate better with an iPhone than Microsoft and Google’s platforms are able to.
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That the MacBook Neo is using a smartphone chip was not a surprise. What surprised me a little was that it’s still acting like it’s in a smartphone, with short bursts of peak performance in both single- and multi-core tests that fall off sharply to keep the chip inside a tiny power envelope.
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It seems as though Apple has left some performance on the table here—based on our testing, even a 7 W or 8 W power envelope would have been enough to improve its sustained clock speeds, while still keeping overall power consumption reasonably low. It’s possible that Apple keeps the power envelope low to help extend the battery life, since the Neo’s 36.5 WHr battery is only 73 percent as big as the M1 Air’s 49.9 WHr battery, and it comes with a similar screen, but it’s hard to say for sure.
I imagine that the only people who will be disappointed with the Neo will be people who were willing and able to spend $1099 on the MacBook Air that they actually need, and tried to save some money by downgrading. Or, people who wind up doing something that I often do: treating the $1099 as a budget, not as an MSRP. A $699 maxed-out Neo leaves you with a $400 bankroll for an external SSD, a USB-C external display in a travel-friendly folio stand, and other niceties. It’s tempting.
To my surprise, it ran this site’s 3D visualization quite snappily, which is no small feat (most PC laptops struggle with it, regardless of what browser and GPU they have). And although I didn’t have the chance to run any benchmarks, RAM usage in Activity Monitor was pretty much OK after launching a gaggle of Apple apps, which wasn’t surprising (their software load doesn’t include any of the Electron bloat everyone has to deal with to some degree).
In general, I think it makes a killer Chromebook/PC laptop replacement for school, and although I expect the A18 to not be a powerhouse, it felt quite snappy, even with multiple apps open.
Novelty is a hell of a drug, but I also think there’s something to specific products that, despite them clearly not being the best technical option available, still have a draw for some reason.
I keep trying to find a breaking point in my own workflows, but I honestly can’t. Yes, it’s ever-so-slightly slower at certain tasks. And yes, my workflows are admittedly pretty light, dominated by web-usage with a few native Mac apps sprinkled in here and there. But I gave it a solid week of daily usage. There’s nothing I would consider a deal-breaker here or even close to it. So I’m keeping it.
I’m honest-to-god surprised by this. I had assumed I might return it and opt for an M5 machine. Instead, I think I’m gonna trade in one of my other Macs.
Reviews keep saying the MacBook Neo puts other laptops ‘in its price range’ to shame, but it very clearly puts PC laptops four times its price to shame. And that’s before accounting for the RAMpocalypse which is going to clip the PC market’s wings this year. There’s a potential future where Apple becomes the largest consumer PC manufacturer by market share, effectively overnight, depending on how this plays out. A perfectly-timed kill shot for an industry in turmoil
After our initial benchmarks, we can clearly say that Apple pretty much just toys around with the competition from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm because the single-core performance of the MacBook Neo is better than any other mobile processor (except for Apple’s M4 and M5 chips).
Antonio G. Di Benedetto of The Verge has reviewed the MacBook Neo as well as numerous PC laptops, and he thinks it’s not going to go well for PC makers[…]
Framework (via Mike Rockwell):
Framework founder Nirav Patel heads to the Apple store to get the new MacBook Neo and takes it apart to see how it compares with our Framework Laptop 12. From repairability to design choices, this comparative teardown explores two very different, but overlapping approaches to building entry-level laptops.
It feels as good as Apple’s premium laptops, and in one or two specific ways, actually feels better. Whether it’s the friendly design or just the new feet, which I think are significantly nicer than the ones on Apple’s Air and Pro machines, it feels outstanding to hold and to use.
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In my experience, the MacBook Neo performs worse across the board than that M1 MacBook Pro. Yes, the single-core performance is higher, but there are fewer cores, and the efficiency cores are even slower. There’s also half the RAM, which I think is probably the biggest bottleneck in this device. Paired with the significantly slower SSD (about 2/3 the speed of M1 drives and 1/5 the speed of M5 drives), the system has to rely on swapping to the SSD even more. So while I can open a good number of apps at once and the experience is okay, it’s worth noting that the experience is worse than doing the same things on an M1 with 16GB RAM. If I could have the MacBook Neo with its outstanding construction and hardware trade-offs, but put an M1 with 16GB RAM in it, I would choose the M1 every single time.
If you are a savvy shopper with a very limited budget and need that push beyond what the MacBook Neo can give you, you are probably better off searching for a used or refurbished MacBook Air. Last week on MacBreak Weekly, Christina Warren made a strong case for picking up a refurbished or used M3 or M4 MacBook Air, which would cost slightly more than a MacBook Neo but far outclass it in terms of features.
But this entire conversation misses the most important thing about the MacBook Neo: It is sold in every Apple Store, on Apple’s website, and in every Apple sales channel. Most people won’t think to cruise for a refurbished Air—they will just go down to their local store, or pop onto Amazon, and shop for a computer. That’s why the MacBook Neo is important. It’s available to everyone, everywhere, and Apple will stand behind it as a new product.
Seeing is believing when it comes to emulation, so it’s worth seeing how your favorite systems fare before diving into emulation on the Neo yourself, but I was surprised to see how well the Neo did even on systems as recent as the Nintendo Switch 1. Beyond the GameCube, it’s hit or miss what will run well, but older systems like NES, Game Boy, GBA, SNES, PS1, PSP, 3DS, PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn games all ran well and in most cases at upscaled resolutions and with shaders applied.
See also:
- Initial NEO thoughts
- Why I Returned the MacBook Neo
- MacBook Neo: A Software Developer’s Perspective
- The Macbook Neo is the best thing Apple has ever done for the Mac
- Things that need fixing on the MacBook Neo
Previously:
- MacBook Neo Sales
- Ads in Apple Maps
- The Secure Design of the MacBook Neo’s On-Screen Camera Indicator
- MacBook Neo
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"Beyond the GameCube, it’s hit or miss what will run well"
That sounds unbelievably atrocious, since any entry-level Android phone can easily emulate the GC, and fortunately, it's wrong. The actual Retro Game Corps video shows that more demanding platforms like PS3 and Switch can be emulated just fine; the problem is that some games are glitchy.
But that's just because emulators haven't been tested on the Neo yet and haven't received any updates to resolve these issues, not because the Neo isn't fast enough to emulate them.
