The MacBook Neo is basically a smaller, more colorful MacBook Air that’s lighter on features. Apple sells it in four colors: Indigo, Blush, Citrus, and silver; the first three you may know better as dark blue, pink, and a sort of lime yellow-green. Beyond the quirky three colors, color coding is a nifty perk here. The different color schemes carry through to the keyboard, the bottom cover’s rubber feet, and many macOS interface elements, such as scroll wheels and confirmation buttons—a bit of real, nifty polish.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
This new laptop is clearly inspired by the existing MacBook design launched back in 2022, but with a bunch of tweaks. The Neo is a little thicker than the 0.44-inch MacBook Air models, at exactly half an inch thick. It weighs the same as the 13.6-inch Air, at 2.7 pounds.
Beyond this and the slightly smaller (13-inch) display, the Neo shows a few more subtle differences from Apple’s former budget laptop. I immediately noticed that the brushed finish on the Neo’s aluminum housing is more pronounced than on other MacBooks, possibly because it’s made with a higher percentage of recycled materials (60%) than any Apple product to date. It’s a fuzzier, fun look.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Neo chassis also features side-firing speakers instead of speakers beneath the keyboard, venting out slits on the left and right side that resemble SD-card slots. As noted earlier, the keyboard lacks a Touch ID power button on the base model. Finally, the webcam, mounted above the screen, doesn’t have the usual MacBook “notch” cutting down into the display area—instead, the screen bezels were made a bit thicker to accommodate the lens.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
How does this all compare with its budget PC competition? None of the PC laptops we benchmarked against the MacBook Neo has a full-metal frame, and only one might be as rigid and resistant to bending. That’s the Framework Laptop 12, built to meet MIL-STD-810 durability requirements and clad in rubber bumpers. (It also starts at $200 more than the Neo and has a smaller screen.)
Not one of these laptops is as thin or light as the MacBook Neo, either, generally by around a pound and a few tenths of an inch across the board. The Snapdragon Arm-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 hews closest to the Neo in thickness, despite its much larger 15-inch screen. Meanwhile, the 12-inch Framework Laptop 12 is just a tenth of a pound heavier—the price of ruggedization.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Finally, none of these competitors comes close to the MacBook Neo on screen quality. The Neo’s display is sharper than any budget 13-inch laptop’s, but not quite a 1440p panel, and it shines with more than 500 nits of brightness and broad coverage of the sRGB color gamut (borne out in our testing). All of these PC laptops are stuck with 1080p or 1200p screens that don’t even come close in terms of gamut coverage.
To their credit, all of these PC laptops trounce the Neo on connectivity, if that’s critical for you. I’ll dig more into the port arrangement, display, and other features, but the spoiler is that the Neo’s connectivity suite is its biggest disappointment.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
On the whole, though, the MacBook Neo is a brand-new Apple laptop that brings the usual MacBook standards for design and material quality to a remarkable new low price. You’ll likely hear or see a lot of reviews say, “Only Apple could do this,” when speaking of the MacBook Neo’s build quality and performance mix. While I don’t disagree, statements like that need context. That might be true, but if so, it’s the result of Apple’s deeply integrated positions in chip and device manufacturing, coupled with control of its entire product stack, and buoyed by its gargantuan cash reserves to weather any missteps or, ahem, supply chain upheavals.
