Apple redefined how good a budget laptop could be with its $599 MacBook Neo, an ultra-light 13-inch laptop powered by an iPhone processor. It’s attracted plenty of attention since its release last month—largely for its budget-friendly price. After about a week of hands on use, I’ve been impressed by its solid build quality, comfortable keyboard, and vibrant screen. It feels like an excellent fit for students, office work, and everyday use at home or on the go—and it’s hard to argue with the value.
The Neo’s portability also makes it appealing to photographers working on location—whether shooting destination weddings or traveling for landscape and wildlife photography—as well as videographers who need to keep content flowing while away from their main setup. But how well does it actually perform for creative work? I put the Neo through its paces with some of the most popular creative apps to find out where it shines—and where it struggles.
Can the MacBook Neo Handle Demanding Photo and Video Editing?
Lightroom Performance: Smooth for Basics, Slower for Heavy Lifting
I’ve been using the base model of the MacBook Neo with 256GB of storage, though there’s also a $699 option that bumps storage up to 512GB and includes a fingerprint scanner for quicker, more convenient logins.
I test every camera that comes into PC Labs with Adobe Lightroom Classic, the industry standard for Raw processing, and the creative app where I’ve logged the most hours. I reached into my archive to see how well the Neo handles photos captured with the 33MP Sony a7 V and the 100MP Hasselblad X2D II 100C. The a7 V is a pretty typical camera for pros, and an obtainable option for hobbyists. The Hasselblad is higher-end for sure, but its 100MP resolution is standard among medium-format cameras today.
With both file sizes, the Neo handles basic exposure adjustments without any problems or lag. It lets me tone highlight, shadow, contrast, and apply dehaze, texture, and clarity adjustments quickly, and see the nondestructive edits appear in Lightroom’s Develop panel with immediate results. I also tried upright perspective correction, color channel mixing, and applying virtual film grain with no lag at all. That’s all good news for photography.
Basic exposure edits work well in Lightroom, but the Neo struggles with more advanced retouching features like Denoise and dust spot removal (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
On the downside, I noticed some lag when moving to different parts of a photo at full magnification, and some of Lightroom’s more advanced features take some time to work, too. Dust spot removal, which I use quite often to remove sensor dust from landscape scenes or clean up product photos, is laggy compared with what I’m used to with the M1 Mac Studio Max I’ve used for creative work for the past four years. Denoise is especially lengthy with the Neo. I applied Adobe’s advanced noise reduction to an ISO 1600 image from the a7 V, and it requires a full 90 seconds to finish, versus about 20 seconds for the Mac Studio.
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I also noticed that the Neo takes longer to import images from a memory card versus a newer Mac laptop. I loaded all the photos from my a7 V review onto a 2TB Lexar CFe card that’s rated for snappy 3,600MBps read speeds and used a Lexar Professional Workflow card reader to download the gallery to the Neo. The ingest took about 71 minutes for 1,218 Raw+JPG pairs; that’s 2,436 files in total and about 80GB of data. Lightroom splits the operation between import (47 minutes) and preview creation (24 minutes) with the Neo.
Only the rear USB-C port works at modern transfer speeds; the front port is limited to USB 2.0 bandwidth (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
I ran the same import on my wife’s 2025 M4 MacBook Air, and it took 44 minutes in total. With the Air’s M4 chip, Lightroom can import and create previews simultaneously, significantly reducing import time. If you’re offloading images in a hotel room after a long day of photography, you won’t mind as much, since Lightroom works fine while you’re sleeping. But if you’re on deadline and trying to get edits quickly, the extra time matters.
Long story short, the Neo does a good job with basic edits, but it lags with some of Lightroom’s more advanced features, and is slower to import than the next model up in Apple’s laptop line.
Video Editing: 4K Flies, But 8K Brings It to Its Knees
The Neo is a good option for light video editing as well. It handles 4K footage without a problem, but higher resolutions are problematic. I loaded some 4K clips captured with the Canon EOS R50 V and some 8K video from the EOS R5 Mark II into Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve to put the Neo through its paces.
The Neo handles 4K footage without a problem in Final Cut Pro, but isn’t good for 8K clips (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
All three suites made short work of the 4K footage. Playback is smooth, and I had no problem applying a LUT, layering multiple clips on top of each other, adding cross-dissolves and other transitions, and the like.
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None can handle 8K on the Neo, however. Playback stutters, audio falls out of sync, and Final Cut chokes when trying to export an 8K timeline. While there’s little reason to export at such a large resolution, some creators record in 8K to leave room for cropping or pulling out both widescreen and vertical edits.
Export times are a little lengthy. I’m used to Final Cut Pro zipping through an export on my 2022 Mac Studio M1 Max at a brisk pace. The Neo takes longer. I put together a six-minute 4K timeline, and it took the laptop about three minutes to render and save it as an H.264 video file. This isn’t a big concern if you’re making short-form content for social media, but if you’re using the Neo for longer form projects like video podcasts, it could be an issue.
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Storage and Connectivity: A Bottleneck for Serious Work
The Neo has pretty limited connectivity options for creators. It doesn’t have a built-in memory card reader, which may or may not be a sticking point depending on your camera. An SD card slot is great if you use a camera that uses SD or microSD media, but is of no use for cameras that use Compact Flash Express (CFe). Either way, you’ll want to use a card reader with the Neo and make sure you plug it into the rear USB-C port, as it’s the only one that supports 10Gbps USB 3.2 speeds. The forward port is limited to USB 2.0 transfer rates, a piddling 480Mbps, and is better used for charging. You don’t have to worry about this with a newer MacBook Air or MacBook Pro because both lines support Thunderbolt and USB 4.0 transfer rates (40Gbps).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Neo’s SSD is pretty meager for high-pixel cameras and video editing, too. The base model comes with 256GB, but by the time I loaded the operating system and a few creative apps, I was down to around 128GB available for media. Creators know how fast that can fill up. The upgraded Neo comes with 512GB, and I think that’s worth an extra $100, especially if you also want to load up a couple of movies or a television season to keep you entertained on a flight.
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Editing from an external SSD is a viable option, though you may have to do a bit of a song and dance to transfer media from your camera’s memory card to an external drive. Since there’s only one high-speed USB-C port, you’ll want to add a hub to make it easier to connect a card reader and external SSD simultaneously. This adds some cost and takes up extra space in your gear bag, but it’s worth it to avoid copying files from a card to the Neo’s internal drive and then back to an external SSD.
When using an external SSD the Neo’s transfer rates (left) are much slower than an M4 MacBook Air (right) (Credit: Blackmagic/PCMag)
Alternatively, if your camera supports direct SSD recording, you can simply shoot and edit to the same drive, though that feature is only supported by a handful of digital cameras. The Neo’s USB 3.2 port is fast enough to get good speeds from an external SSD. It reads from my Lexar 4TB Professional Workflow SSD at around 1,600MBps. That’s not as fast as the drive can go—the same disk gets nearly 2,700MBps with a 2026 MacBook Air’s faster USB 4.0 ports—but it’s speedy enough for high-bitrate video. Write speeds lag on the Neo, too, around 1,425MBps versus nearly 2,000MBps with the Air.
The 13-inch screen size is a matter of preference, but I prefer something a bit larger for creative work. That’s really up to you, but I will say the Neo’s display looks great and shows accurate colors, and helps keep the Neo’s weight down to 2.7 pounds. The 15-inch MacBook Air weighs about 3.3 pounds, but its roomier display is worth a little extra weight in my book.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Verdict: Great Value for Everyday Use, Less Convincing for Creators
After spending some time with the MacBook Neo, I’m impressed by both how much it can do and how well it’s made, given its extremely reasonable asking price. I’m less enthusiastic about it for creative work, though, given that it’s easy to find a MacBook Air with a larger 15-inch display, more memory, a faster M4 processor, and Thunderbolt speeds for external storage devices, all for around $949. The Neo is a good value if you have a beefy desktop workstation at home and simply want a laptop for light edits while traveling or days when you want to work at the coffee shop, but I think it’s worth it for photographers and videographers to stretch their budget a little further and get a MacBook Air instead.
About Our Expert
Jim Fisher
Principal Writer, Cameras
Experience
Images, and the devices that capture them, are my focus. I’ve covered cameras at PCMag for the past 14 years, which has given me a front row seat for the changeover from DSLRs to mirrorless cameras, the smartphone camera revolution, and the emergence of drones for aerial imaging. I have extensive experience with every major mirrorless and SLR system, and am also comfortable using point-and-shoot and action cameras. As a Part 107 Certified drone pilot, I’m licensed to fly unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for commercial and editorial purposes, and am knowledgeable about federal rules and regulations regarding drones.
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