MacBook Neo Review - It Might Be TOO Cheap.

This is the MacBook Neo. I've been using it as my only computer for several days. It's a very good device, but it's not like so good that it becomes the automatic choice for people trying to get a MacBook. It definitely has some shortcomings. I'm going to try to break this down. When you open the box, the paper wrapper has hello written on it. I think this is a first for a MacBook. And you get a 20 watt adapter as well as a charging cable. This is a very well-built aluminum laptop. It's not rare in the laptop space to have something that's fully aluminum like this. What is rare is when you have something that's five or six hundred bucks that is built like this. In fact, this is the only device I've seen that is quite like this. Now, when I first got it, I open up the lid and it's a one-hand openable hinge. Now, you might think, who cares what is so special about a one-hand openable hinge? Well, as someone who's handled like several hundred laptops over the past few years, a onehand openable hinge that stays open, like that doesn't just like wobble around as you lift it up, this is quite difficult to do and is often a sign of really good engineering. It's just not cheap to do. So, the fact that they did it, we're off to a good start. And this is the blue color. They call it their indigo. And there's also a matching retro skin from Dbrand that looks pretty cool. Now, laptops in this price band are usually built with like bottom of the barrel components. It's low profit margin. So, companies try to use the cheapest stuff they can get away with. But Apple is a little bit different because they have access to several things. First, they make their own chip and they also make their own operating systems. They can squeeze every last drop of performance out of that combination. But the other thing is that Apple is comfortable selling things at like without super high margins because they know that once you're in their ecosystem, they can get you with like services and apps and just things that they can charge you for over time. once you're trapped in their little bubble. But Apple also has to be careful in choosing components for this because they also sell a MacBook Air. And this product needs to be able to sit on the shelf with the MacBook Neo and people still need to be interested in buying this. So, they have to choose components that are cheap and weak enough so that both of these products can sit on the Apple shelf. So, the first thing we're going to look at is the screen. This is a very nice looking screen, but it is not as good as the MacBook Air screen. It's still 60 Hz and the colors are good. It's got decent coverage of the sRGB color space, but it doesn't cover the full P3 color space. But unless you work with these color spaces for photo or video work, chances are you probably won't notice or even care. It's a great screen. It's a little bit smaller than the Air, but it's one of the best screens I've seen in that $500 or $600 range. Arguably the best. Now, in terms of performance, the Neo is fast in benchmarks and fast when you're using it. I was surprised when I popped this out of box and started testing it. I was like, "This is so much more performance than I thought it would be, all things considered." Like the chip came from a phone, right? And to see it being used like this, it was pretty impressive. The chip and the 8 gigs of RAM are enough for regular computer use. And by that I mean like stuff you do in a browser or email. But you can also edit photos with it, even do some light video work. It's like very capable all things considered. Now, the GPU is also decent. It's perfectly good for casual games, but graphically demanding stuff is just going to eat dirt on this laptop. I did run Cyberpunk at like the lowest possible settings on this machine. I was getting like 50 frames and change, which speaks more about the developers and how much effort they've put into optimize that game for weak hardware. But the fact is this is again so much more capable than I thought it would be since it's a phone chip. The drive comes in around 1,600 megabytes per second readr. It's fast enough to make the disc swap feel responsive. But the biggest concern is the 8 GB of RAM and you cannot configure it with more because that's just the limitation of the chip that Apple went with. And right now, if you're running Mac OS in the current state of the operating system with like one or two tasks and you're just switching back and forth between them, it's perfectly fine. But if you have anything that's a little bit more just a little bit more taxing, right? If you have, I don't know, like a Xcode project that's a little bit bigger or you're working with video files that are higher resolution, more layers, or like more complex edit in Photoshop, like bigger or higher resolution photos, all of those things tax the system, and you do start to notice, you really feel the limitation of those 8 gigs. Now, this is designed for the education market, right? It's designed for a certain age group that doesn't need like super fast performance and crazy amounts of RAM. But if you're interested in this device and you're like, "Hey, this is something I could potentially use, especially with all those cool colors," just keep in mind that this was not built for speed or performance. And also, if you took this device and just had like a somehow another version of this exact device, but with 16 gigs of RAM, in 5 years time, that device with 16 gigs of RAM would still feel really fast. It's just how Apple silicon has been. But with 8 gigs, I think in 5 years time, this will feel a little slower than you'd like. Uh, if you're curious, this is what the camera and mic look and sound like. I think the image is pretty good. The audio from the mic is decent. Not amazing, but decent. The keyboard feels really nice to type on. I imagine the components inside here are different from like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro just because of the cost difference between the products, but this feels very similar in just typing experience to those devices. It's very fast and responsive. Now, the trackpad is very interesting. So, I was surprised to find out that they were not running a haptic trackpad on this laptop. So, keep in mind that for the past 10 years or more, like since 2015, every single one of Apple's laptops have used a haptic trackpad. So, it's a trackpad that doesn't have any moving parts. It's got a little motor on the inside, but there's no like mechanical movement on the inside. There's no like physical click. It's the sensation of a click that comes up from a little motor that that taps your finger. It's a great trackpad. It's beloved by the industry. It's arguably the most accurate, the most reliable, the most precise trackpad on the planet. And new for 2026, they went with something that wasn't that. So, they created a mechanical trackpad just for this system. And the craziest thing is that I think this is a better mechanical trackpad than most Windows laptops that are out there. It's crazy that on this budget system that Apple's like, "Hey, we're going to make something that's $500, $600." This is better than so many Windows trackpads out there. So, the way this works is quite interesting. If you take a look on the inside, you can see how they did it. So, there's a back plate that mounts into the frame of the laptop. And on the front side of this plate, there's like a little nub uh just right in the middle of it that makes contact with the button that's right on the back side of the touchpad surface. And when you click that touchpad, it doesn't matter where you click it, it will actuate the button because the entire touchpad is floating on top of this back plate. So there is no kind of diving board or can lever that you see on typical Windows laptop mechanical touchpads. This is so well engineered. And there's obviously these like little springboards that pop it back into the neutral position after you've made the click. But this system works so well. It is shocking to me that they built this specifically for a budget MacBook. Now, using it, I don't find it as good as their haptic trackpads. Moving the cursor around is still really good. The tracking is fantastic, but the clicks sometimes if you click super fast, like if you're trying to do box selects in like an editing program or if you're just like dragging multiple things around, I've noticed that sometimes if you go quick that like right there, I already clicked it but it's not registering the movement. Uh, sometimes it just happens that you just got to slow it down. But I found like on the haptics like it never misses. This is close but not as good. But I still find it to be an amazing trackpad system. You can't upgrade the RAM or storage on the MacBook Neo. It's all baked on. But all the components look like they can be easily removed. There's like big screws everywhere like the USBC ports, the trackpad, the battery. Everything looks like it can just be removed and replaced if needed. The speakers are huge. I don't know what percentage of this is like actual driver or just like how much of is just space to create volume but it's just like they're big huge percentage of the real estate is speakers. The thing is these speakers don't sound particularly good. Surprising because for one Apple drew attention to these speakers in that little video. Like they're sidefiring speakers. I thought they would sound really good. But the other thing is that it's Apple. Their laptops have had some of the best sounding audio for the past decade. And these are just I mean they get loud, but the lower frequencies just aren't there. Uh the battery isn't particularly big. It's 36.5 W hours. The battery life is good, but it's not great. If you're a student and you need this battery to last the whole day, you do need to be careful with brightness. Like if you crank it, it definitely takes a hit. But if you leave it at moderate brightness, the battery life can be good. It only has a 20 watt charger in the box, but it can handle higher. I was able to get 30 watts when charging it, but it still took over an hour to fill it up. The port selection is pretty limited. There's only ports on the left. So, there's two USBC and then one headphone jack. The one on the left is USB 3. This is USB 2 on the right. And there's no mag safe. So, if you're plugged up to charge on one of them, you only have like one left for the periphery. But this left one is where you'd connect for the external monitor. And the big question is, is it worth it? And for this conversation, I'm going to assume that you can pick this up for the $500 educational discounted price. There's uh I mean, there's a lot of ways you can get that. So, I'm just going to assume that this is a $500 machine. Now, if your budget is 500 bucks and you cannot or do not want to spend any more than that, then this is the best, in my opinion, the best $500 laptop you can get on the market. Like I've seen conversations of like, oh, you know, just buy a three-year-old like ThinkPad and install Linux on it. Like, bro, no one's cross shopping a 3-year-old Linux device and this. At least most people aren't. I get the sentiment. It's just that it's completely different conversation. But I think the real question, at least the question I think many of you might be asking is, is this thing worth buying over the MacBook Air? because right now you can get a used M4 MacBook Air with 16 gigs of RAM for, I believe, $760 on the Apple Refer Store. So that's in US. And also, might I just throw in the into the mix, there are Windows laptops that in that, you know, 7 $750 price range, also reverb, that are also amazing devices. Uh Yoga Slim 7X is one of them. Like OLED screen, great device. Like there are a lot of options in that price point is what I'm trying to point out. But if you're just looking at MacBooks, personally, I would go for the MacBook Air. That's a significant bump in spend. But with that extra money, you get so much stuff. It's not just the extra RAM. You get a better chip. You get better keyboard with backlighting. You get a better screen. You get better speakers. Everything is just improved. Better battery life. And by comparison, the MacBook Neo seems almost too cheap. And over the duration or time of ownership, that extra money that you spent up front will pay off in spades over time. Okay, so that's the MacBook Neo. It's got beautiful colors, very attractive. It's got color matched feet, color matched screws. Even the key caps, if you noticed, are also color matched. But 8 gigs of RAM is 8 gigs of RAM. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video.