It’s petite, light, and finally cute enough to fill out your Kirby-themed desk setup. Still, Apple’s colorful, relatively affordable MacBook Neo isn’t doing anything you haven’t seen before. Instead, the Mac maker is offering what may become one of the best deals in laptops today.
The MacBook Neo starts at $600. It’s an even better deal for students at a base price of $500 with an education discount. Still, that doesn’t mean this will be the only laptop you’ll need, especially if you’re at all concerned about a mere 8GB of unified memory. And if you think you’ll be using it for more than browsing, you should pay more attention to the version with 512GB of storage for $700. That more-expensive MacBook Neo also comes with Touch ID, which the lower-end model doesn’t.
Three of the four colors the MacBook Neo comes in are appealing, especially because they each feature color-matched keyboards. The “Citrus” yellow is less banana-toned than the yellow iPhone 14, but it’s still the best of the bunch. My second favorite may be the darker Indigo, mostly because I’ve never gotten over the fact I never had a goth phase. To put it plainly, they look so much more interesting than even the “Sky Blue” MacBook Air.
After running my hands over the MacBook Neo’s bright, aluminum chassis, I came away with one central impression: this is a MacBook. It uses a similar-feeling frame to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, just more compact. It features a low-profile Magic Keyboard that you’re already so used to on every Mac from the last six years. The trackpad isn’t the same Force Touch as on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The new version is called a “Multi-Touch” touchpad that uses a mechanical switch compared to the haptic touchpads on more-expensive Macs. The Multi-Touch pad lacks the deep click capabilities of those other Macs.
The 13-inch MacBook Neo is designed for the kinds of users who don’t need many of those extraneous features. This laptop runs on the Apple A18 Pro mobile chip we first saw in the iPhone 16 Pro. That means it’s running on a similar ARM-based microarchitecture of the mainstay M-series MacBooks. Apple promises there are no compatibility issues between the higher-end Macs and this low-cost laptop. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be running every app like you can on an M5 MacBook Pro. For instance, video editing apps like Final Cut Pro may not run nearly as well on a mobile-first chip. However, the chip may have enough juice to run Pixelmator from Apple’s new Creator Studio app package.
What seems clear is that the MacBook Neo is best if you’re merely browsing, streaming content, and playing a few Apple Arcade games during your lecture when your teacher isn’t looking. The Liquid Retina IPS LCD display is similar to what you get on the MacBook Air. It maxes out at a 60Hz refresh rate, supports HDR content, and the brightness tops out at 500 nits. I browsed the Gizmodo website and watched several movie trailers at max brightness. It seemed well suited for the dim environs of Apple’s event space. What’s even more surprising is the wide viewing angle I could get without much distortion to the display clarity.
The sound that you can get from this $600 laptop is equally impressive. The MacBook Neo comes with twin, 2W side-firing speakers along with a subwoofer on both flanks. It was not loud enough to eclipse the din of the legions of tech influencers crowding around. In a quiet corner, the audio seemed clear and crisp. Many laptops of this size—even expensive creator notebooks—sport down-firing speakers, which bounce off the table and create a muffled, tinny sound.
You’ll need to suffer several trade-offs for this price point. There’s no backlight to the keyboard. You have to spend more for Touch ID. There are only two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, like the MacBook Air. One is USB 3 and the other is USB 2. Only one port supports a single external display at 4K and a 60Hz refresh rate. Both accept charging, though don’t expect any fast charging without the higher-end MacBook’s MagSafe port.
There may be even more drawbacks we’ll learn once we finally get to test the MacBook Neo in earnest. Already, its 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage to put your mug in view for Zoom meetings. There’s no desk view mode, either. The Neo is further limited to Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 6E.
More than with any other new MacBook, we’re forced to consider what may be coming in the future. The limitation of 8GB doesn’t stop Apple from promoting support for chatbots running on-device. However, every other MacBook now starts with 16GB of RAM. This was explicitly to support future AI integrations, including the long-delayed AI-ified Siri. The MacBook Neo may miss out on future features.
When considering how poorly received Windows 11 Copilot AI has been, the MacBook Neo may be a safe haven from Siri’s inevitable colonization of the next iteration of macOS.
Source: Gizmodo