8GB of RAM is a bummer, but this $599 laptop cuts most of the right corners.
I suspect the MacBook Neo will become a common coffee shop companion. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, “new-in-box” not as in, “was released recently”) that will power up and boot Windows or ChromeOS.
Buying a decent cheap laptop, or recommending one to someone else who’s trying to buy one? That’s hard.
For several years I helped maintain Wirecutter’s guide to sub-$500 laptops, and keeping that guide useful and up to date was a nightmare. It’s not that decent options with good-enough specs, keyboards, and screens didn’t exist. But the category is a maze of barely differentiated models, some of them retailer-exclusive. You’d regularly run into laptops that were fine except for a bad screen or a terrible keyboard or miserable battery life—some fatal flaw that couldn’t be overlooked.
When you did find a good one, the irregular patterns of the PC industry meant you could never be sure how quickly it would disappear, or whether it would be replaced with something of equivalent value. More than once, a new pick for that guide vanished in the short interval between when it was tested and selected and when the update to the guide could be published.
When recommending cheap laptops for the people in my own life, I normally ask them when they want it and how much they’d like to spend, and then stay on top of sales, refurbished sites, and eBay until I find the one fleeting deal on a laptop that meets their needs at their price point. This approach does not scale.
One reason why I’ve been so curious about Apple’s long-rumored budget MacBook was because it would be really, really nice to have something close to $500 that a person could just go out and buy without having to worry about whether they were getting the right thing (you wouldn’t want to mistake the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-32P-C0Z2 for the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-71P-59PZ, would you??), or whether it would be available at all. Something with Apple’s typical warranty support and network of retail stores behind it. And something that would integrate better with an iPhone than Microsoft and Google’s platforms are able to.
The MacBook Neo definitely has flaws. It’s missing a few things that have been standard on MacBook Airs and Pros for a very long time. Performance is decent, but in many of our tests, it’s the slowest Mac Apple has shipped since the Apple Silicon Mac era began, including the original M1. And a laptop, any laptop, with 8GB of memory in 2026 is eventually going to cause problems for you—it’s a question of when, not if.
But it starts at $599 (or $499, with Apple’s educational discount). That brings it in way under the $1,100 asking price for the latest MacBook Airs, even if you spring for the $699 version with 512GB of storage and Touch ID. I still think anyone who can afford an Air, even an older refurbished model, will be happier in the long term if they buy the Air instead. But like the $349 iPad before it, I don’t think spec sheet deficiencies will be enough to keep the MacBook Neo from being popular with kids, first-time laptop buyers, or anyone with a modest budget and basic needs.
The MacBook Neo’s lid. The Apple logo is embossed, without the mirror finish of the Air or Pro.
For past budget products, Apple has leaned extensively on updating old designs rather than building all-new ones. For many years, the cheapest iPad was an updated version of the 2013 iPad Air; over three generations of the iPhone SE, Apple recycled the designs of both 2013’s iPhone 5S and 2017’s iPhone 8.
I thought it very likely that Apple would reuse the design from its 2018–2020 MacBook Air refresh, which it had already been selling through Walmart for $599. But Apple decided to build an all-new MacBook Neo design instead, one that makes it more consistent with the modern Airs and Pros.
Instead of being wedge-shaped, the Neo is a flat, rounded aluminum rectangle when it’s closed, and it has a slightly smaller footprint than the old 13-inch Air. Four color-matched feet keep the bottom of the laptop up off your table or desk. Its 13-inch screen doesn’t have a notch, but it does have rounded corners at the top and square ones at the bottom, mirroring the design of modern MacBook Airs and Pros. Its resolution and pixel density are very close to the old M1 Air (2408×1506 for the Neo, 2560×1600 for the old Air), but it gets slightly brighter. We measured 506 nits at maximum brightness, in line with Apple’s 500 nits estimate, and higher than the M1 Air’s 400 nits.
The Neo comes in four colors that are a bit more noticeable and eye-catching than the ones Apple uses for the MacBook Air. We were sent a yellow (“Citrus”) review unit, though if I were buying one for myself, I’d probably prefer the dark-blue Indigo. Classic MacBook silver and a pale pastel pink (“blush”) are also available. As it does with the iMacs, Apple ships the MacBook Neo with color-matched wallpapers and a special color-matched theme and text highlight color in the Appearance settings, along with the standard nine options that all Macs have.
The Neo comes with custom color-matched highlight colors.
The Neo comes with custom color-matched highlight colors. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The MacBook Neo’s keyboard uses the same layout as Apple’s other laptops, including the full-height function keys, and has a very similar feel to the Air’s keyboard overall. Apple is using the same scissor-switch mechanism as in the Air here, though the color-matched finish on the keycaps does feel a little different from the typical black keys. If the typing feel is any different from the MacBook Air’s, it’s so minor that I stopped noticing it almost instantly.
The trackpad is a different story. As we covered in our hands-on piece, this is the first time in a while that Apple has shipped a trackpad with a physical clicking mechanism, rather than using a Force Touch trackpad that uses haptic feedback to simulate clicking. It took a little getting used to the Force Touch trackpad at first, but Apple has been using it in laptops for more than a decade, so now it’s that trackpad that feels normal to me and a physical clicking mechanism that feels strange.
Apple has engineered this trackpad so that you can click anywhere on its surface and it will feel about the same—there’s no stiff hinge at the top as there is in many trackpads. It uses a pair of flexures that both move in unison to provide a uniform clicky feeling over its entire surface.
The Neo’s color-matched keyboard has the same layout and key feel as the Air, but without a backlight. Andrew Cunningham
Using it feels fine, and it’s just as accurate as other Apple trackpads, though it’s a bit smaller than even the M1 MacBook Air’s trackpad. But I miss the way you can adjust the feel of clicking on a Force Touch trackpad, and (on some models) the amount of noise it makes. I also hadn’t realized that I’d worked Force Touch into my macOS muscle memory until I used a Mac without it for the first time in a while—using it to quickly rename files and folders in the Finder was the big one for me, but you may have others.
That’s a common theme for the MacBook Neo, actually. Apple hasn’t cut anything that feels absolutely essential to the MacBook and macOS experience, but it has scaled back on a whole lot of small frills that had become standard-issue on all other Macs released this decade.
In addition to the physical-click trackpad, the MacBook Neo comes with a non-backlit keyboard, a 1080p webcam without Center Stage support, no Touch ID button on the base model, and no MagSafe charging connector. Its screen doesn’t support the DCI-P3 wide color gamut (though we measure it at about 91 percent of the sRGB gamut, which is pretty good for this price category), or the True Tone feature that adjusts the display’s color temperature to match ambient lighting. There’s no Thunderbolt connectivity.
Apple has shipped MacBooks missing all of these features before. But it’s been a very long time for some of them—I’m fairly sure a backlit keyboard has been a feature in every single MacBook sold in the last 15 years.
The Neo on top of the 13-inch M1 MacBook Air.
The Neo on top of the 13-inch M1 MacBook Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The 1080p webcam and the laptop’s side-firing stereo speakers are unexceptional but functional, though generally I’d say they’re a notch or two better than what you’d get in a PC for this price. The webcam is missing the Center Stage feature that tracks you as you move, though I generally find myself turning this off because I find it distracting. The webcam image itself looks a bit smoothed-out and overly processed, but white balance, auto-exposure, and auto-focus are all decent. It’s more than adequate for Zoom or FaceTime.
In PCs around this price, “making noise” is usually the only requirement for the speakers, and the quality of that noise is mostly an afterthought. The Neo’s speakers don’t reach nearly the “that sounds pretty good, actually” threshold of the MacBook Pro or even the 15-inch MacBook Air, but they do a decent job overall, playing vocals and other treble-y tones with good clarity and volume. But the overall effect is still a bit tinny, and there’s not much bass to speak of.
The MacBook Neo’s port situation may be its most confusing change from older MacBooks.
MacBooks sold in the last decade have generally had between two and four Thunderbolt ports, all of which have been (mostly) functionally equivalent. You can plug whatever you want into any of them, whether that’s a charger or a monitor or external storage or some kind of dongle, and they’ll all work the same way.
The MacBook Neo has two ports, and they look the same as any ports on any other MacBook. But they’re just regular USB-C ports rather than Thunderbolt ports, and they both do slightly different things. The leftmost port, if you’re looking at the laptop from the side, supports 10 Gbps USB 3 connections and can also drive a single external 4K 60 Hz display. The rightmost post is limited to 480 Mbps USB 2.0 speeds and doesn’t support external display output.
Both ports can charge the laptop. But for high-speed external storage, external displays, gigabit Ethernet dongles, USB-C docks and hubs, and any other accessories you might want to use with the Neo, the leftmost port is the most capable one.
To make up for the fact that these ports are totally unmarked and that no other MacBook asks you to keep this stuff straight, Apple has built some notifications into macOS to steer users in the right direction. Based on our testing, whenever you plug a USB 3-or-higher accessory into the USB 2 port, you’ll see a notification about how higher speeds are possible with the other port. These accessories still work in the USB 2 port, just with reduced performance.
The left port on the side of the Neo is a USB 3 port that supports display output and 10 Gbps data transfer speeds. The right port is a USB 2 port. Either can charge the laptop. There’s also a headphone jack.
Plugging a monitor or a display dongle into the USB 2.0 port will generate a slightly different notification telling you to use the other port for display output. If you’re trying to plug in a USB-C monitor with a USB hub and USB-PD charging, those features will still work through the USB 2.0 port, but display output won’t.
All of this port stuff is downstream of Apple’s decision to use an A18 Pro processor in this Mac instead of an M-series processor—a chip designed for the iPhone 16 Pro, not a laptop with a bunch of I/O. Its USB controller supports a single 10Gbps USB-C port, because the iPhone only has one port; supporting a second 10Gbps USB-C port would have been a waste of silicon.
We might see this change over time. If Apple plans to keep putting iPhone chips in future MacBook Neos, those could be designed with more than one USB 3 port, in the interest of streamlining what is currently a non-deal-breaking but slightly annoying limitation of the MacBook Neo. It is a reminder that the decision to use a smartphone processor can affect functionality in ways beyond CPU and GPU core count. Bear this in mind as we talk about performance.
Apple says that the MacBook Neo supports a single external display, with a resolution and refresh rate of up to 4K at 60 Hz. This is also something that stems from the re-use of a smartphone chip—no one is attaching their iPhone to multiple external screens. But even the M1 Air supports a 6K display at up to 60 Hz, so it’s another place where the Neo is a small downgrade compared to every other Apple Silicon Mac.
I can confirm that a 1440p display works at 75 Hz, but I don’t have a comprehensive list of the refresh rates supported at lower resolutions. The Neo isn’t capable of driving the Studio Display or Studio Display XDR at their native 5K resolutions.
