The MacBook Neo sits at the bottom of Apple's MacBook lineup, and that single fact shapes everything about it. At its price point, it goes up against laptops that routinely disappoint, which makes what Apple has pulled off here genuinely worth paying attention to.
Coming to you from ZY Cheng, this detailed hands-on video walks through the MacBook Neo from build quality and cost-cutting decisions all the way to real-world performance benchmarks. Cheng is upfront that every other current MacBook is objectively a better machine, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. What he does argue is that Apple has managed to set a surprisingly high floor for what the minimum Mac experience actually feels like. The build quality, the hinge, the keyboard, the fit and finish all feel consistent with what you'd get from the MacBook Air or Pro lineup above it.
Where things get interesting is in how Apple trimmed the price without making the product feel cheap. The Neo drops MagSafe charging, uses a mechanical click trackpad instead of Force Touch, and only one of its two USB ports is USB 3 compatible. The display covers sRGB but not the wider P3 color space found on every other current MacBook, and the headphone jack doesn't support high-impedance headphones. Cheng's take is that most people never use those features anyway, so skipping them is how Apple lands at this price without gutting the experience. Color-matching, though, gets full attention: the keyboards are tinted to match the chassis, the USB ports match, the headphone jack interior matches, even the rubber feet on the bottom match. The Apple logo on the back uses a matte finish, distinct from the glossy black on the Pros and the mirror finish on the Airs.
The chip inside is the A18 Pro, originally designed for the iPhone 16 Pro. Cheng breaks performance into three categories. Basic productivity, web browsing, graphic design in Pixelmator Pro, and even Photoshop all run without issue. Light to moderate video editing in Final Cut Pro, including 4K footage with color grading, LUTs, and audio mixing, is workable but not the most responsive experience. The third category is where the Neo starts to show its limits: local LLMs, heavy compositing in After Effects, real-time noise reduction, and demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 all push the machine harder than Cheng recommends. On Geekbench 6, the A18 Pro's single-core score is competitive with the M3, but the M2 MacBook Air still holds an edge in multi-core GPU performance. The 256 GB base model swaps Touch ID for a standard lock button, though macOS lets you unlock it with an Apple Watch instead. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Cheng.
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