Here is the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new entry-level Mac laptop. Its colorful chassis options easily set it apart from current MacBook Air and Pro models. But the biggest difference is that inside the Neo is an A18 Pro iPhone chip instead of an M-series processor Apple typically uses in its laptops and recent desktops.
The first thing you notice, touching the device, is obviously the colors. They’re not quite as vibrant as the orange iPhone 17 Pro, but the blush and citrus colors (which are more like chartreuse-ish and purple-ish) do look pretty nice. Apple says the keyboards are color-matched, but the effect is pretty subtle, and was a bit hard to see under the harsh lights of Apple’s hands-on area.
The Neo is the same weight as the latest MacBook Air, but it carries the weight very differently. The Neo feels denser, more like a slab of metal somehow. In a short test, the keyboard felt about like an Air keyboard, but the touchpad felt very different. It clicks! For the first time in a while, there’s a MacBook with a trackpad that actually, physically moves. You can click it from any spot on the trackpad, so the experience of using it shouldn’t feel much different.
In general, the Neo is a fascinating set of tradeoffs. It has a full, even bezel around the screen, instead of a notch for the camera and sensors. All the ports — the two USB-C slots and a headphone jack — are on the left side of the device, and there’s a slim speaker on each side that look a lot like an SD card slot. The 13-inch screen isn’t quite as good as the larger and more colorful screen on the Air, but looked good enough in a short demo. The A18 Pro obviously can’t compare to Apple’s latest M5 chip, but at least so far seems to handle basic tasks without a problem. The webcam, well, it’s a MacBook webcam.
Ultimately, the question for the Neo will be whether Apple got these tradeoffs right enough to make this a compelling $599 laptop, rather than just something from which to talk yourself into a MacBook Air. There are only two Neo options: a $599 model with 256GB of storage, and a $699 model with 512GB and a TouchID sensor. (The fact that you can’t upgrade the Neo’s 8GB of RAM immediately seems like one of the worst things about the device.)
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