Tested: Apple’s MacBook Neo breaks the rules – creativebloq.com

A Mac for just under $600/£600? We’ve been here before, with underpowered models that didn’t satisfy creative needs. The Neo is a much better prospect, though it’s still not the machine for grinding through video encoding or rendering tasks. It excels at being small, nippy, and lasting just about long enough to get everything done. It’s stripped back compared to some of the laptops we’ve tested, but it has enough power to be useful, and comes in a lovely range of colours.

It’s not often that we get to review a bonafide bargain at Creative Bloq, but Apple has surprised us all with just how good the MacBook Neo is for its low price. It’s powered by an iPhone processor, but none the worse for it until you start trying to move 3D or video really fast.

Things like a paucity of GPU cores and a small puddle of RAM begin to show quite fast when you do that (especially compared to the best laptops for CAD or best laptops for video editing), but for most other uses, including writing, giving presentations and image editing, the Neo does well enough to make it a useful addition to any creative’s toolkit.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Thin but not that thin
• Good range of colours

Noticeably smaller than a 14in MacBook Pro, but still thicker than a MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo sits right at the bottom of Apple’s laptop range in the niche formerly occupied by the 12in MacBook, which lasted from 2015 until 2017.

Hopefully this 13in model will be around for a bit longer, because it’s built to exactly the same standards as its premium siblings, with only scant evidence of cut corners. And speaking of corners, they’re just as rounded as you’d expect, echoing the edges of the screen and the OS’ application windows in their roundness.

The one sent to Creative Bloq for review is Citrus – a sort of metallic lime green – but you can choose the pinky Blush or blueberry Indigo as well, along with plain old silver. In this way it follows the lead of the iPhone and iMac, and with a bit of luck it will become the norm to see people carrying around brightly coloured laptops instead of all the grey and black models. That the OS matches its Finder windows and wallpaper to your exterior choice is a nice touch too.

Unlike the MacBook Pro, the Neo doesn’t have its name written anywhere on its body, even the bottom of the screen is unadorned, and the Apple logo on the lid is body-coloured and not deeply recessed. As such, it’s almost a stealth MacBook, if such a thing were possible for a laptop that’s bright green.

Being small, there’s less room for a large battery, but the 36.5WHr cell in the Neo does well enough, averaging just over 12 hours before needing to be charged, so should be good for a day’s work. There’s no charger in the box, but it will accept USB chargers above 20W, though there’s no fast charging if you go higher.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• No keyboard backlighting
• Only two USB ports

You only get two ports on the side of the MacBook Neo, and some people aren’t going to like this at all. Before we start, remind yourself that the MacBook Air launched with just one Type-A USB 2.0 port, while the 12in MacBook had one USB 3.1T Type-C.

You get two on the Neo! One is USB 3.2, with a 10Gbps data rate and the ability to hook up to an external screen. The other is, somehow, only USB 2.0, and can transfer data pretty slowly as a result. You can charge through both of them, and if you plug a USB device that uses 3.2 into the 2.0 port, the OS will warn you, and the same is true if you try to use a Thunderbolt accessory.

Other than that, and the 3.5mm audio port, the outside edge of the Neo is bare. This paucity of ports is almost certainly a limitation of the A18 Pro chipset the Neo runs on, and is still one up on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max it came from.

The keyboard reaches almost all the way to the edge of the case, and there are no speaker grilles to either side. These have been moved to small slits on the sides of the machine, and they’re not bad for laptop speakers. That’s not saying much, however, and you’ll still want to use some Bluetooth cans – perhaps the new AirPods Max 2 – if you’re using it for media playback, which you might want to do as it’s possible to feel the speakers vibrate beneath your wrists when you rest them alongside the trackpad.

The keys only have about 1mm of travel, the same as the MacBook Air, and are very nice to type on, but they’re not backlit. At all. This is going to be a problem for anyone who works in their car or likes to type in bed with the lights down low, but given enough external lighting the caps are clear and easy to differentiate.

The key at the top right differs depending on which model Neo you buy. Stick with the base 256GB SSD and it’s a lock button which can also be used to turn the laptop on. Splash the extra for 512GB and it becomes one of Apple’s fingerprint readers. This means if you buy the base model you’ll have to get used to typing your password every time you unlock it.

Feature score: 3/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system’s potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU’s ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.

Performance

• Gets there in the end
• Not bad for photo editing

The A18 Pro at the heart of the MacBook Neo is also found in the iPhone 16 Pro phones. It’s not an M-series chip, though it uses the same ARMv9.2A instruction set as the M4, and is passively cooled like the MacBook Air.

You get six cores in total, two of them high-performance at 4GHz and the other four energy efficient at 2.4GHz. This isn’t much of a drawback when you’re just running web browsers, word processors, or even image editing apps, but you’ll start to see it struggle with anything heavier.

The GPU only has five cores (one less than in the iPhones), and there’s the usual Apple Neural Engine NPU with 16 cores. Another drawback of this SoC is that it only supports 8GB of RAM, which despite Apple’s clever Dynamic Caching tech that aims to increase memory usage efficiency, looks like a very small amount in 2026.

Productivity apps are fine on the Neo, however, and even Photoshop doesn’t do too badly. In Geekbench 6 it’s down the bottom of the table among the ASUS V16s and Acer Swift 3s of this world in terms of single-core performance, but is a little better in multi-core mode, overtaking the Core i7 of the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9 gaming laptop to nestle just below the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI, which uses an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.

The tiny GPU sits with the smallest integrated graphics chips at the bottom of the table too. Where it does well is in AI applications run on the CPU, where it scores much the same as the MacBook Pro with M5 Max (they’re probably using the same NPU), but of course a GPU is much faster, and it sinks to the bottom quarter of the table when compared with bigger graphics chips.

In Photoshop it’s near the bottom of the table but far from the worst we’ve seen, and it’s perfectly capable of importing, cropping, colour correcting and messing about with a few layers. The Premiere Pro test timed out a couple of times thanks to the sheer amount of time the A18 Pro needed to churn through video encoding, and at one point slowed down so much that the mouse pointer froze on-screen, but it got there in the end. None of its scores were particularly high, but this is clearly not the kind of work the Neo is made for.

This is actually a pretty good showing for something so cheap that’s running on an iPhone processor, positioning the Neo as a great secondary machine, perhaps alongside a Mac Studio for the heavy lifting. If you’re into music production, YouTubers have shown the Neo running Logic Pro and Ableton quite happily at up to around 150 tracks, just taking a bit longer to do things than an M5 machine.

Performance score: 3/5

Price

Starting at just $599 or £599, and potentially less if you’ve got access to education pricing (and with the 512GB SSD upgrade only costing $100/£100) the MacBook Neo looks like a bargain. It’s a fully fledged Mac, not some halfway house like the iPad Pro or a Chromebook, and will make a fine secondary machine, or your primary one if you’re running productivity apps rather than trying to render.

Value score: 5/5

Who is it for?

• Students and managers

The MacBook Neo hasn’t been built for the kinds of jobs you’d use the MacBook Pro with M5 Max for, and that’s OK. It’s a low-cost, extremely portable laptop that’s great for productivity and office apps, and which has Apple’s exemplary build and snappy OS.

Buy it if…

• You want a small, cheap laptop
• You’d rather have a Mac than a Windows machine
• You’re not looking for extreme performance

Don’t buy it if…

• You need more
• You need bigger
• You need it in black

Also consider

Apple MacBook Neo

A Mac for just under $600/£600? We’ve been here before, with underpowered models that didn’t satisfy creative needs. The Neo is a much better prospect, though it’s still not the machine for grinding through video encoding or rendering tasks. It excels at being small, nippy, and lasting just about long enough to get everything done. It’s stripped back compared to some of the laptops we’ve tested, but it has enough power to be useful, and comes in a lovely range of colours.

community guidelines.

” data-join-the-conversation-text=”Join the Conversation”>

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.