Apple MacBook Neo review: 5 reasons it's the £599 MacBook for the masses

There’s an iPhone in every other pocket in the world. Can Apple put a MacBook in every other home on the planet — or at the very least, in every classroom? That the aim of the brand new MacBook Neo, Apple’s new portable computer that swaps out a traditional computing chipset for a mobile chip instead.

It’s cheap, it’s colourfully cheerful and, after just shy of a week's worth of testing in real-world conditions, more than up to the majority of tasks most people use their computers for.

MacBook Neo: In Short…

• A MacBook powered by an iPhone chipset, the A18 Pro
• Runs full-fat macOS Tahoe
• Starts at £599, with student pricing at £499
• 8GB of RAM across all models, with 256GB or 512GB of storage
• Touch ID on £699 model
• 13-inch Liquid Retina display at 2408 x 1506 resolution
• Colourful aluminium external casing options
• 16 hour quoted battery life
• 1080p FaceTime camera
• Two USB-C ports and a headphone jack
• Lightweight at 1.22kg

This is the MacBooks for the masses, at a price approachable to even cash-strapped students.

Here's five reasons why everyone should be paying attention to Apple's budget-oriented MacBook Neo.

1. A genuinely affordable Mac

Here’s the first big point — this is a MacBook that is actually, no kidding, affordable. Starting at £599, it’s coming up to close to half the price of the next-most-affordable MacBook, the M5 MacBook Air. Though the Air just got a price bump, with its entry point now at £1,099, no doubt due to the ongoing RAM meltdown the industry faces, the Neo still undercuts it significantly. Older Air models can be picked up cheaper, but the new MacBook Neo is, by a considerable margin, Apple’s cheapest portable computer when bought brand new.

The £599 unit gets you 256GB of storage, and has a lock button on its keyboard. A step-up model at £699 bumps the storage to 512GB and adds a Touch ID fingerprint scanner to the keyboard for quick unlocks, payments and an added layer of security.

£599 is a great starting point — but it gets even better if you’re a student. Apple’s student pricing scheme gets you in the door here for £499.

Is there a catch? A small one — there’s no charger in the box. But if you’ve got a recent iPhone or iPad, or any other device that charges over USB-C, chances are you’ve already got what you need to refuel the MacBook Neo. If not, you’re going to have to factor a few more notes into that otherwise-great price.

Move the comparison away from Apple's own line of products and to the wider Chromebook and Windows competition at this budget, and it's an even wilder match-up. From build quality to performance to screen clarity, Apple makes a massive leapfrog over alternative computers at this price point. And, compared to the Chromebook category, which still has limited app support 15 years after first launching, the Neo's full-fat macOS experience simply wipes the floor.

2. It can do anything a Mac can do

Anything the M-Series chips can do… an iPhone chip can do just as well? Or at least, almost? That’s the gambit here. Apple’s betting that, for the majority of users the MacBook Neo is aimed at, an A18 Pro chipset will get the job done. And the A18 Pro proves itself very capable in its laptop-shaped home.

This is the same chipset that was found in 2024’s flagship handset, the iPhone 16 Pro — an incredibly capable device even today. It may be a 'binned' version of that chipset (meaning its GPU core count, the visual processing brain of the machine, is slightly less powerful than that of the smartphone version), but in reality that will mean little to the day-to-day operation of the Neo for the audience it's aimed at.

Both the A-series chips (found in iPhones and some iPads) and M-series chips (found in MacBooks and some high-end iPads) are Apple’s in-house silicon design. As both are 64-bit, ARM-based and similar in core architecture, it's made it relatively simple for Apple to equip the MacBook Neo with the iPhone's guts, with little to no compromise in terms of macOS performance.

The full macOS operating system, Apple's own apps, and thousands of third-party applications are all available to MacBook Neo users. And despite the seeming limitations of what was originally a smartphone chipset limited to 8GB of RAM support, the Neo proves very smooth in operation.

For the past few days I've been using it as my primary work machine, and, like many in the workplace or studying on campus, find that the majority of my work tasks are now carried out across dozens of browser tabs. The MacBook Neo has absolutely no qualms with this environment, even when working with my company's preferred Google Chrome browser rather than Apple's own Safari.

I regularly jumped between tens of browser tabs, streaming apps, PDF files and image editing software like Canva and Photoshop, and the Neo didn't miss a beat. My primary machine at home is an M2 MacBook Air released in 2022, and the experience felt largely the same. Heavier multi-tasking maybe saw the Neo occasionally miss a beat when batch editing high-resolution images... but not in any deal-breaking way, and certainly not at the expense of an additional few hundred quid in an end-user's pocket.

There will undoubtedly be eyebrows raised at whether or not a mobile chip, backed with just 8GB of RAM, has the juice to fuel a regular computing session — but that’s as much of a question as to what constitutes a regular computing session for the everyman. If you’re mostly browsing the internet, replying to emails, watching videos and tapping away at documents… well, you can do all that on an iPhone very easily, not to mention doing very capable video and audio editing and some pretty beefy gaming these days, too. So putting that power in a MacBook shell, at an affordable price, has proved here to be not only conceivable, but possibly even sensible.

Yes, video editors with multiple ingest streams and high-pressure edits are still going to covet their super-powerful MacBook Pros (which also got an M5 Pro and M5 Max update , too). But for those that just need to get a little school work done, pay some bills or share some photos? Maybe even do a little creative work on the side? The Neo will have more than enough in the tank for that.

3. MacBook and iPhone apps living side-by-side

This may be an iPhone chipset, but you’re getting full macOS Tahoe applications here, not just some mobile-only alternative builds. If you’re familiar with Pages, Keynote, Freeform and the usual suite of built-in Apple Mac apps, they’re all present, as well as third-party favourites like Photoshop, Slack, or whatever else you use every day. The underlying similarities between Apple’s A-series and M-series chips mean nothing gets left behind.

And, if you’re coming to Mac for the first time as an iPhone user, all your favourite iPhone apps are here now too. Apple’s excellent Continuity feature, which lets Apple devices interact and piggy-back off each other, means your iPhone can easily pair with the MacBook Neo and put your iPhone apps side-by-side in the same library as your Mac apps, ready to be run right next to your Mac apps. The same goes for iCloud-based Photos and Notes, synced between devices, and also clipboard entries too — copy something on your iPhone, and it’s available to paste on your MacBook Neo.

Sure, there’s nothing new here — all this works on a MacBook Air, or Pro, or desktop Mac Mini or Mac Studio — but getting this feature set and convenience at this price point is very attractive. Microsoft's Windows and Google's Chromebook machines attempt similar interoperability across devices, but neither pulls it off with the level of ease that Apple manages, fuelled as it is by having control over every bracket of hardware with its branding on it. Pop open your AirPods case, and the Neo will automatically connect to them. Sit an iPad next to the MacBook Neo and it'll act as a second screen for the laptop. Recieve a FaceTime call on your iPhone left in one room, and answer it on the Neo in another spot. It's all seamless.

Where things are going to get interesting is with more demanding applications and power users. MacBooks are beloved by the creative industries for their processing power, be that for 3D rendering, ultra-resolution video editing, and near-infinite audio stem recordings. This is not the machine for that sort of workflow, and at £599, that's totally reasonable. But for beginners in those industries, looking to start on some smaller projects? iMovie, Garageband and the like will get them on the road to those professional worlds.

4. AI-ready — and onboard

Apple’s AI, or Apple Intelligence as the company calls it, is cooked into all of Apple’s latest products, and the MacBook Neo is no exception. Just like the iPhone 16 Pro that the A18 Pro chip debuted in, the MacBook Neo can access on-device Apple Intelligence features, as well as tapping into additional ChatGPT artificial intelligence features in the cloud if specified. It's one of the main reasons that the chip is employed here over, say, the original M1 MacBook chips — this smartphone silicon, with its neural processors, is much more capable with on-device artificial intelligence applications.

At a basic level, Apple Intelligence can help you clean up hastily-written text, generate images from prompts, and help with quick image editing tasks like removing a background — or an unwanted photobomber — from a scene. That’s the tip of the iceberg, and Apple Intelligence is getting new features all the time.

5. The most colourful Macs ever — and with better-than-you’d-guess specs

The MacBook Neo comes in four very attractive colours. As well as the staple MacBook Silver, you’ve got a soft pink, a blue-gray indigo, and what I’m calling the ‘Brat Mac’ citrus green, which I've been testing out for this review. The attention to detail is careful throughout — keyboards are colour matched with complementary tones to each case, as are even the speaker grilles (stereo, with spatial audio support, built into each edge) and the underside feet.

Those speakers are surprisingly loud and capable too, giving a good sense of separation when sat in front of the MacBook Neo, and, when paired with the 13-inch, 2408 x 1506 resolution display, will be great for a bit of dorm-room movie viewing. It’s bright, sharp and richly coloured, and a fair sight finer than the quality of screen you usually find on a laptop at this price point.

In terms of connectivity it’s no slouch either — Wi-Fi 6E isn’t far off the fastest standard available at the moment, and Bluetooth 6 is bang up to date.

There’s a couple of compromises to the build of the MacBook Neo. There’s no backlit keyboard (which may prove a legitimate pain to students taking notes in dimly-lit lecture halls), and though the trackpad is perfectly responsive to multi-touch gestures, it doesn’t have the haptic feedback other MacBooks offer. Only one of the two USB-C ports onboard is a speedy 3.0 port, with the other being a 2.0 port best suited for attaching low-powered accessories. With USB 2.0 limited to just 60MB/s, it feels antiquated, and, as the two ports aren't labelled could prove confusing for the less tech-savvy buyer wondering why their transfer speeds are so diminished on one port over the other.

Battery life is quoted as ‘all day’ — and that’s counted here by Apple as 16 hours of general use compared to the M5 MacBook Air’s 18 hours. On a full charge with what I'd consider to be standard usage for the user this machine is aimed at, I clocked around 15 hours of use before reaching for a charger. That's pretty good going, and will easily see someone through a full work day and through an evening's recreational Apple TV stream.

It’s also Apple’s lowest-carbon MacBook, with the Neo using 60 percent recycled content in its construction, more than in any other Apple product to date.

MacBook Neo: Final Verdict

The MacBook Neo punches far above its weight, and way beyond its peers in this price point. It's the most important laptop Apple has launched in years. At £599 (£499 for students), it meaningfully lowers the barrier to macOS, and it does so without feeling like a token “budget” compromise. The headline gamble — running a Mac on the A18 Pro chip first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro — makes more sense than it might initially sound. For browsing, essays, streaming, light creative work and everyday multitasking, there’s clearly enough headroom to run macOS Tahoe.

Yes, power users will still want a MacBook Air or Pro, and there are a few minor corners cut: no backlit keys, mixed-speed USB-C, and a few premium niceties missing. But judged on its audience — students, families, first-time Mac buyers — the Neo feels less like a bargain. Expect to see even more MacBooks in coffee shops by the time the next school term starts.

• The affordable iPhone just got a glow-up with the 17e

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