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The Neo is a joy to use

The MacBook Neo is clever and disruptive. Not just because of the price, or because of the specs, but because Apple understood the users they were designing for. Every other laptop at its price is worse in the most important ways. Apple prioritises user experience over making a spec-sheet look good with big numbers, and the Neo is the latest addition to that, now at a more accessible price. The MacBook Neo starts at just £599 for the 256GB model (or £499 with the education discount). The fact that the device is this nice, and it starts at £599 new is crazy. The trade-offs they made and how they used their expertise with their own hardware lets it, in my opinion, compete with laptops that are triple its price. Design constraints don’t have to mean a constrained user experience, and this is a great example of it.

Who is the Neo for?

The MacBook Neo is aimed primarily at students, which is evident from the Neo’s overview page and marketing. The type of uses are light computing. Web browsing, Google Docs/MS Office, note-taking apps, occasional video streaming, social media. To this user base, portability matters more than raw performance. More broadly, casual users who don’t use laptops intensively. Writers, journalists, teachers, small business owners doing email and spreadsheets, anyone doing “creative work” that doesn’t require sustained system load (writing, light photo editing). It is not for: developers, video editors, gamers, machine learning engineers. These users need the Pro or a desktop machine, or if you’re a light developer you can get the Air like me. The Neo is honest about its limits instead of pretending to be something it’s not.

The Neo’s competition

The main competitors to the Neo are Chromebooks and entry-level laptop models from other manufacturers. To keep things simple, I’ll compile them into a table, along with Framework’s Laptop 12 (more about it later).

Specs	Dell 14 Laptop DC14250 cndc1425006	HP Laptop 14-ep1007na (CF6X2EA)	HP OmniBook 5 Flip 14-fp0001nax (D77FLEA)	Framework 12	MacBook Neo
Release	~Jan 2026	Jan 2024	Mar 2025	2025	Mar 2026
Price	£599	£580	£699	£749	£599
System	Core 3 100U, 8GB, 512GB	Core Ultra 5 125H, 8GB, 256GB	i5-1334U, 16GB, 512GB	i3-1315U, 8GB, 512GB	A18 Pro, 8GB, 256GB
Display	14” 1920×1200, 300 nits, 45% NTSC	14” 1080p, 250 nits, 62.5% sRGB	14” 1200p, 300–400 nits, 62.5% sRGB	12.2” 1200p, >400 nits	13”, 500 nits, 100% sRGB
Weight	1.56–1.65kg	1.4kg	1.4kg	1.3kg	1.23kg
Build	Plastic	Plastic	Aluminium	Plastic, modular	Aluminium unibody
Upgradable Parts	RAM, SSD, WiFi	Storage	Storage	Fully modular	None
Cooling	Active fan	Active fan	Active fan	Active fan	Fanless

The HP and Dell laptops prioritise raw specs on paper, they tend to have more storage and RAM as well. However, they cut costs on build quality and the display. Framework in my opinion is the most interesting because they’re going against the whole industry, trying to create a repairable, upgradable laptop that lasts a long time. However, since they’re a smaller company and spend more on build quality, their laptops tend to be quite a bit more expensive. Their laptops are also thicker and heavier due to their modularity.

What the Neo does better

The Neo prioritises the core things that you would interact with the most. The display is colourful and accurate, has a high pixel density which means things are crisp, and it gets bright enough to be comfortable outdoors. The colours of the aluminium unibody are a nice break from every single silver and black laptop in existence.

It’s also fanless. That, and the build quality aren’t things you notice very much when using them, but definitely notice the absence of. A noisy fan in a lecture hall, library, or quiet bedroom or a shaky lid hinge, or a flimsy trackpad/keyboard deck, these all contribute to friction with the product, preventing you from actually doing your work. A laptop is primarily a tool, so it should get out of your way and let you work. Build quality is often the first thing that other manufacturers sacrifice, because you can’t feel a laptop through an online store page.

How did they achieve the price?

They re-used their A18 Pro chips that were used in the iPhone 16 Pro. Since they already had the platform for running macOS on mobile chips, (the first M1 chip was based on the A12Z used in the iPad Pro) it wasn’t too hard to repurpose those chips. That helped them get the price down. Apple Silicon Macs are famous for their world-leading efficiency and their performance. And the Neo is slightly more powerful than the original M1 Air with 8GB of RAM, which I used for a few months for my design and development work.

The laptop also lacks premium features like MagSafe. TouchID is missing on the base model, and it lacks a haptic trackpad. Despite the lack of a haptic trackpad, the Neo doesn’t have one of the main problems with non-haptic trackpads, which is their inability to click down anywhere on the surface. Also, due to limitations with the A18 Pro chip, Apple was only able to put one USB-3 port on the Neo, with the second one being USB-2.

Both of these directions helped them cut costs where features weren’t essential—the Neo wouldn’t be possible with only one of these.

Nothing is perfect, and neither is the Neo

Specs

The most apparent issue is the specs. It has 8GB of system memory which is on the lower end nowadays, and 256GB of storage. However, the memory speed is fast, so you wouldn’t really notice slowdowns until you start running intensive apps, which isn’t the target userbase anyway. Apple can’t really do much about that, since the memory is bundled within the chip itself. However, the A19 Pro comes with 12GB of memory, which is an improvement, and in the next generation Neo, Apple may use that, though that’s just speculation on my part.

Repairability

According to iFixit, the MacBook Neo Is the Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years—though it still has non-upgradable RAM and storage. The RAM is impossible to make upgradable due to the SOC architecture, but the storage could have probably been made upgradable in a similar way to the new 2024 Mac Mini. Repairability is important, because the best way to prevent waste is to use things for as long as you can—and repair extends that life.

Thermals

The Neo uses passive cooling, and thermal throttles sometimes, reducing performance at high temperatures to keep the chip stable and to reduce heat generally. All computers do this. Since the Neo doesn’t have fans, it’s easier for it to throttle. But the significant effects of thermal throttling are only obvious when you’re doing things that the Neo isn’t designed for, like gaming, 3D rendering, or compiling big code. The Neo isn’t designed for intensive usage like programming and video editing, though it handles it decently well if you’re just doing things like that occasionally. The device is designed for students who will be running a web browser, office software, and social media. This won’t cause the Neo to throttle 99% of the time.

The viral “fix”

People added thermal pads to the Neo, using the chassis as a heatsink. This is fine, but there are trade-offs that everyone seems to ignore because making fun of a company and making them look stupid gets attention on social media. That heat from the chip doesn’t disappear, it goes into the chassis that you’re touching and putting on your lap. This makes the chassis hotter (what a shocker). Apple has to comply with safety standards which make sure manufacturers don’t let their laptops get too hot, and additionally it would feel uncomfortable. Why would they do that, making the overall experience worse for the 0.1% of users who will complain about this on Reddit?

Conclusion

The Neo is great, despite its constraints. They didn’t try and create the most impressive spec-sheet, they understood the gap in their lineup, and created a device that actually works for its users, which is unlike most other products out there, even out of this price range. A low price doesn’t have to mean a bad experience, and this is a rare example from Apple.