MacBook Neo Review by an Actual Laptop Reviewer

[00:02] Neo. YouTubers have been out in force hyping this thing up like Apple just literally bent over and farted out a rainbow. I mean, the clickbait thumbnails and titles have been absolutely off the dial.

[00:15] Guys, we're here to cut through the crap. We've had four full-time laptop reviewers really focus on this device. So, today I'm going to walk you through I'm going to talk about who should actually buy one.

[00:28] But, since I value your time, and I really do, here's the skinny. Overall, we love what Apple is doing here. It's very disruptive and it's going to place manufacturers just to up their game, particularly in the budget space. But,

[00:42] on the flip side, there's also risks to Apple marketing this device the way that they are. If you're sticking to light tasks like basic web browsing and office applications, sure, the Neo is viable. But, if you can find an older MacBook

[00:55] Air with M3 or M4 for around the same price, guys, that is a much better those, you should carefully consider the Windows laptops that I'm going to compare the Neo to today before jumping in. There are just several of those

[01:09] available at this price point that bring different pros and cons to the table that may better suit your needs. With that said, uh let's start with the Neo's chassis. It looks really good, and there is something for everyone when it comes

[01:21] to those colors. You got silver, which looks classic, the dark indigo looks classy, blush looks soft and pretty, and citrus is bold and fun. I mean, come on, Windows one at this price point. I mean, take Acer's Aspire 14, it just looks

[01:36] like your grandfather's laptop. The only area where the Neo does look a bit cheap isn't one of those clean edge-to-edge screens that you see in more expensive laptops. Now, when we first held the Neo, it did feel very sturdy and

[01:49] Solid keyboard deck with no noticeable flex and a rigid lid. Most cheap Windows laptops, they just feel a bit flimsy by comparison. But, after we used the Neo model, it didn't sit quite flat on the desk. It is minor and we didn't notice

[02:05] probably won't even show up in our b-roll, but it is there. keyboard deck is still sharp, just like other MacBooks. This can cause the you don't have adequate support for your arms. The Neo does have a lip, so your

[02:21] finger can grab the lid and open it with one hand. The hinge, it feels strong, holding up the screen. So, it shouldn't topple over if you're using it on a bumpy train or something like that. Now, on portability, the Neo weighs 2.7 lb,

[02:34] which is pretty decent, similar to Microsoft Surface Laptop 13, which I feel probably the most comparable Windows laptop. same, but the Air, it is thinner with a larger 13.6-in display. Now, on the

[02:48] Neo's display, it is very pixel dense at 219 pixels per inch. It basically means crisp. Windows laptops at this price point, they often have lower resolution panels, which just don't look as sharp.

[03:01] The screen gets very bright. We measured it at over 500 nits. It is a glossy it does a good job of combating reflections. I'd say good enough to use in any indoor environment, but you'll still struggle in direct sunlight.

[03:14] Rounding out the display, it refreshes at 60 Hz. Its color gamut is decent, good enough for any professional color work. We didn't detect any backlight bleed from its IPS panel, PWM flickering was nonexistent, and in case you're

[03:28] wondering, the screen does not support touch. Moving on to the keyboard, it is surprisingly good. Typing on the Neo actually feels more comfortable than typing on an Air. If you don't know, the MacBook Airs, they do use a low-travel

[03:40] like you're typing on a flat surface, which I don't find comfortable. The keys on the Neo are not only comfortable to type on, but they're also quiet. So, if you're chatting to friends in class, you shouldn't distract anyone else.

[03:53] But, there are some big downsides to the keyboard. Firstly, there's no backlight. So, if you use the laptop in the dark like I often do, you may find yourself just having to angle your screen down to find a key. What's also annoying is not

[04:05] having a fingerprint reader on the cheaper model. You only get it on the fingerprint reader or say face recognition before, it's just hard to go back. Most Windows laptops, they do have one at this price point. The trackpad is

[04:19] also very good. Tracking was accurate and so was the click. It is a mechanical trackpad, but it does use a completely different mechanism to Windows ones. On the Neo, you see, the click feels the same no matter where you press it. But,

[04:31] mechanically click it at the top because it uses a diving board mechanism. But, if you click on the bottom, it goes down a lot and you can lose accuracy. Ports are bad. The Neo has two USB-C ports that both support charging, but

[04:44] that front port, it is really slow. USB 2, 480 megabits. It's only going to be charging the laptop or plugging in a mouse, not driving an external display. Now, that other port, it is better at USB 3 10 gigabit speeds. It can drive an

[05:00] external monitor at 4K 60, but it seems not always. When we plugged it directly into our LG monitor, it did work. I was even able to use the monitor as a USB hub, so I could get that super clean setup, you know, a single cable that

[05:13] charges the laptop and drives the external display, keyboard, and mouse. However, when I tried to plug the laptop into my Thunderbolt dock using an HDMI cable to connect from the dock to my monitor, I couldn't go above 4K 30 Hz. I

[05:26] cable. Seth's [snorts] Thunderbolt dock, it didn't work at all, but Sierra's simpler USB dock, it did work, even with an HDMI cable. So, guys, you may have to do a lot of finagling here. The speakers, on

[05:39] laptop at this price point. We even heard some bass, which is really good for a cheap laptop. Take a listen. >> [music]

[06:02] like on the new MacBook Neo. It's a 1080p webcam and it looks and sounds pretty decent. For a similarly priced comparison, here's the 1080p webcam on the Microsoft Surface, it looks worse. And here's another example of a Windows

[06:14] laptop at this price point, the Acer Aspire, its webcam is absolutely webcam in dimmer lighting conditions, lights turned off, just using dimmer house lights. Now, normally when we talk

[06:27] performance, I just go straight into the benchmarks, but in this case, let's talk about basic use first. That's because the Neo, it uses a slightly cut-down version of the A18 Pro chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro from 2024. It's only got 8

[06:40] gig of memory, too, just like the phone. But, this version of the A18 Pro, it has one less GPU core. When I was using it for basic tasks like videos, and office work, it felt mostly snappy. On occasion, I did experience

[06:55] spinning ball of death just more than I have on any other Mac. For example, one the background. I could hear the stream just cut out on several occasions, and or anything like that.

[07:10] tasks, too. He didn't have this issue at all, and he actually felt the Neo was perfectly fine for his basic use. He didn't test Twitch, though, and he used Safari, not Chrome. That being said, he did specifically call out that it does

[07:23] MacBook Air. Sierra, she tried using the Neo for some heavier Excel workloads, and it was totally fine for her, too. And all of us, we certainly appreciated that the Neo, it never felt warm and it was dead

[07:36] silent. Anyway, I wanted to see how far I could push this little laptop. So, I Legends. This is one of the lightest games around, it came out 17 years ago, and it runs natively on macOS using Metal. It took a really long time to

[07:50] and I, we actually thought it wasn't working at all. But, once the client loaded gameplay, it was actually great. At a resolution of 1920 by 1200 using medium settings, I was able to maintain well over 60 frames per second. In fact,

[08:05] most of the time over 100. Seth, he tried Old School Runescape and he found it very playable, too. That being said, we absolutely don't intensive on this laptop. You can clearly see that demonstrated in our

[08:18] Still Nomad Light test. The Neo's GPU performance is just woeful compared to almost every other budget laptop, and it's certainly way worse than laptops found in a price tier above. This finding is also reinforced in

[08:31] Wildlife, which uses Vulcan, not Metal. Anyway, given how well the Neo did in going to try hitting it with one of our video projects." Our projects, they're pretty simple, 4K 8-bit color, a couple of b-roll shots, not a lot of effects or

[08:45] Pro. To say the Neo died in a heap would be an understatement. In Activity Monitor, memory was almost always in the yellow and on several occasions hit red. This means you absolutely need more memory.

[08:59] Even playing the video back at a quarter resolution was crazy stuttery. And I did try playing that exact same video on our Acer with its Intel Core i5 processor and 16 gig of memory. It was also very stuttery, but nowhere near as bad as the

[09:12] "You know, Josh, you should use Final Cut, it's better optimized on a Mac." Guys, we just don't use Final Cut here, and I wanted one of our real projects. stitching together a family video, but that's probably about it. All right, on

[09:28] a laptop, running it when unplugged. The doesn't lose performance when you unplug it. Anyway, we hit the Neo with our new definitely heard from you guys that reviewers, they show unrealistic battery

[09:42] results, including us previously. So, this year we've upped the difficulty of our test. The Neo, it lasted around 6 hours, which is pretty disappointing for a modern laptop, likely because the Neo has that smaller battery, 37 watt hours.

[09:56] laptop than a modern MacBook Air. All right, now that I've talked about the here's the benchmarks for people like me. In Geekbench, the Neo is dead last to all other processors you can buy at

[10:11] powerful than a MacBook Air with M1 that came out in 2020. In single-core, the Neo does really well. Single-core speeds can make some applications feel snappy. >> Now, one thing I do want to point out is how much faster the A19 Pro chip is.

[10:26] memory and hopefully we'll see it in next year's Neo. Anyway, let's now switch to Cinebench, which tests the raw CPU performance. You see, Geekbench it tasks and it doesn't max out the CPU like Cinebench does.

[10:40] Here you can see that the Neo falls even further behind. Its single-core performance is now only on par with the M2 MacBook Air and its multi-core performance is worse. This kind of explains what Seth was saying when he

[10:52] said he felt his M2 Air was a little bit faster. Please note that this is the have the M1 Air or the M3 Air in to test it on. Now, to really stress test this laptop, we ran Cinebench on a loop for 10 minutes. The Neo peaked at 7 watts

[11:06] shows you how power efficient this chip is. surface temperatures were actually really cool. We measured only 36° C on the keyboard deck and the underside. Seriously, that's really good. Fan noise

[11:21] was of course non-existent as there is no fan. During this same test, Windows laptops they get really loud. The budget Acer Aspire 14 not only got loud but its fan noise is high-pitched so you really notice it. On to storage, the 256 gig

[11:35] storage drive in our Neo, it is very slow for a modern drive. It's kind of akin to the first generation of PCIe SSDs that were in laptops from over a >> [snorts] >> Given that the Neo it only has 8 gig of

[11:47] memory and macOS uses around 4 gig, this laptop may need to use storage as makeshift memory. In fact, it probably will. And unfortunately, storage is transparency, most reviewers including

[11:59] these laptops as you would. You guys will probably have more applications and browser tabs going than we would. So, this lack of memory and slow storage it could affect you more than what it affected us. Another slightly

[12:12] disappointing area of the Neo was Wi-Fi performance. Even though the Neo it technically supports Wi-Fi 6E, its speeds were less than other Wi-Fi 6E laptops. Still plenty fine for light use, just know if you do have 1 gigabit

[12:24] internet at home, you aren't going to see that speed on this laptop. speeds are lower and you can't upgrade the Wi-Fi card not anything else about this laptop. All right, so let's wrap

[12:36] here. There are really two ways to look at the Neo. If you're certain that Neo's price is the most that you can afford, it is a more complete package point. That is very positive and it is

[12:49] disruptive. It's absolutely going to light a fire under Windows manufacturers to just do better and I think that is a darn good thing. If on the other hand you're going to do something more than just basic use or

[13:01] you aren't sure what your future needs will be or you're someone who plans to there are a lot of you guys out there, buying a Neo it is a massive risk. You'll probably need to replace it sooner rather than later and ultimately,

[13:15] that could just cost you more money than buying a better laptop to begin with. I people are going to see one of these in a store and just think, "Wow. It feels premium, it looks great and I can get a really good deal on a MacBook." Only to

[13:30] just get it home and quickly find out how limiting its performance is. Take university students. A lot of you may change disciplines or try different classes during your four-year degree. With a Neo, there are going to be huge

[13:43] limitations of what you can do when it comes to things like video editing, audio engineering, music production, programming, engineering, 3D modeling, gaming, I think you guys get the picture. I am concerned that a lot of

[13:55] these are just going to end up in landfill within two to three years. This first generation, probably not the one to buy. If Apple ports the newer A19 Pro in a Neo with its 12 gig of memory, adds a backlit keyboard, adds a fingerprint

[14:08] reader to the cheaper model, it's going to be a far more compelling offering. Anyway, regardless of which of these two use cases that you fall into, as I said, if you can find an older MacBook Air with M3 or M4 for the price of a Neo or

[14:20] little further to get one, those are going to be far better than the Neo. And returned model from a reputable reseller, well, you get a warranty. I'll place some links to those older Airs down below. Now, if you can't find one

[14:35] of those, I'd strongly recommend you look at Microsoft Surface. It is a very comparable laptop to the Neo that sometimes drops into this price range. expect to see it drop a lot more. The Surface, it also delivers that

[14:48] premium experience on a budget. It has a nice feeling chassis, good keyboard and trackpad, but the Surface it has much better battery life than the Neo and when I used it for light tasks, it was noticeably faster.

[15:00] The Surface's main downside though is that it uses a Qualcomm processor. So, some specialist applications don't run or just don't run that well, but for the average Neo buyer, probably not an issue. All their apps work. On the other

[15:12] performance at this price point, there are a bunch of other Windows laptops about today. You can even get that laptop with a more powerful Core Ultra 7 chip for $500.

[15:25] the Core Ultra 5 one that we tested today. Unfortunately, those laptops they do feel noticeably cheaper. So, at this your poison. Again, I'll list some options down below. Anyway, regardless

[15:39] of which way you go, you'll absolutely want to check out our website bestlaptop.deals. Over there, we track prices right across retailers so you know where to go to get the best deal. You won't want to be that

[15:51] person who bought a new MacBook at an Apple store for full price if you can find it cheaper somewhere else. You can even set custom price drop notifications at bestlaptop.deals so you can catch a really great sale.

[16:04] Finally guys, we are so close to 400,000 subscribers. It would just mean a lot to me and the entire team if you could help us get there. Till next time, go do something awesome with your day and I will catch you

[16:17] with your day and I will catch you later.