The new MacBook Neo won't come close to competing with the MacBook Air or especially MacBook Pro for video editing and gaming, but it will for the browsing, writing, and music that most users need.
Apple has made its MacBook Neo $500 cheaper than the lowest-cost M5 MacBook Air, and it's done so in part by switching to an iPhone processor. Using the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro, this is not going to match the M5 in Apple's more expensive laptops.
Yet where the MacBook Air and in particular the MacBook Pro are most powerful is in work that requires multi-core use. That's video editing, model rendering, image editing, some audio editing, and certainly scientific work.
MacBook Neo is not the right choice for any of those, but for work that requires single-core processing, it will be. So that's:
- Emailing
- Browsing
- Word processing
- Spreadsheets
- Playing music
- Certain mostly older games
MacBook Neo
There are benchmarks that support this, because the A18 Pro processor is a known quantity. For one example, the A18 Pro's single-core Geekbench score in an iPhone is 3,250, where the M4's equivalent is 3,680.
But that was in an iPhone and while the MacBook Neo presents a similar thermal environment, as yet there are no benchmarks for the new laptop. Then, too, there cannot be any real-world use case quantitative analyses until the MacBook Neo begins shipping on March 11, 2026.
For writing, this is what you need: a full-size MacBook keyboard
Nonetheless, it appears that the MacBook Neo is going to be good for the work that most MacBook owners do most of the time.
There are other issues beyond processor speed, such as storage. The MacBook Neo is only available with either 256GB or 512GB, with the latter adding $100 to the price. At least you get Touch ID for that $100 too.
Users who rely on typically multi-core tasks would need more because they tend to be working with large files like video and audio. Again, though, single-core tasks are more commonly going to involve smaller files like word processor documents.
Then there is a convenience factor in that the entry-level MacBook Neo does not include Touch ID. This is one of those options that if you've had it before, giving it up would be hard.
The new MacBook Neo is surely going to be a big hit
But the MacBook Neo is likely to attract new users to the Mac, and those users will not have had Touch ID before.
In short, we're excited about the MacBook Neo as a whole. The Mac hasn't been Apple's leader in a long time — that crown belongs to the iPhone.
It's a great halo machine for folks that have an iPhone and want to get into the Apple ecosystem on the cheap.
