Cheap laptops have to cut corners by necessity — if they were perfect, they wouldn’t be cheap. But the Neo is unexpectedly solid for its price. After more than a decade of testing Windows laptops priced from $200 to $2,000, as well as almost every Chromebook ever released, Wirecutter’s budget-laptop expert Kimber Streams was pleasantly surprised by the ways in which the Neo outmatched other inexpensive options.
The MacBook Neo has a sturdy aluminum shell, and it comes in fun colors. Most budget Windows laptops and Chromebooks — including our picks, the Acer Aspire Go 15 (AG15-32P-30YE) and the Acer Chromebook Plus 514 (CB514-6HT-368E) — have pedestrian silver-plastic bodies that feel cheap and flex under pressure. The Neo’s aluminum chassis is available in silver too but also in pink (which Apple calls blush), chartreuse (citrus), and navy (indigo), and it feels sturdier and looks nicer than any other $600 laptop Kimber has ever tested. To get a Windows laptop or Chromebook with similar build quality, you would need to spend at least $700 or get lucky enough to catch a sale.
The Neo’s screen blows other budget models’ displays out of the water. The MacBook Neo’s display is higher-resolution, more color-accurate, and brighter than that of any other laptop at this price. The 13-inch screen has a resolution of 2408×1506, nearly twice as many pixels as the 1920×1080 found on the better budget Windows laptops. Like the much-more-expensive MacBook Air’s display, the Neo’s screen can reach 500 nits of brightness, which is bright enough for use outdoors or in direct sunlight. And colors look closer to how they do in real life, as the Neo’s screen can show every color in the sRGB color space, with enough accuracy that you’d need to see it side by side with the original color to tell any difference.
For comparison, the display on our budget Windows laptop pick, the $850 HP OmniBook Flip X 14, doesn’t get quite so bright, reaching only 400 nits, and its colors look desaturated and washed out. And many budget laptops have truly awful, low-resolution (1366×768) TN displays with unseemly blue casts and terrible viewing angles.
The Neo is fast enough for browsing the web and handling everyday tasks. The Neo runs on a processor that was originally designed for the iPhone 16 Pro, and it also has just 8 GB of RAM, so we were wary, concerned that its performance would be underwhelming. But in our testing, we found that it held up well for everyday work. Kimber used it for several workdays and found it more than capable of running about 20 tabs in Chrome with a YouTube video streaming in the background, chats in Slack and Discord, and a Hangouts call. (Chrome is a notorious resource-hog. It’s also the most popular desktop browser by a wide margin.)
The Neo felt better to use for this type of work than our budget Windows laptop picks with similar specs, and it felt about the same as our Chromebook picks. The Neo’s modest memory was completely maxed out under our test workload — so it can’t handle much more — but Kimber didn’t experience any significant slowdowns or crashes.
It works well for lightweight coding and working in other text-based apps. The Neo is capable of handling simple coding, as well as using writing tools like Obsidian and Scrivener. To test coding, Wirecutter’s Mac and pro-laptop expert Dave Gershgorn installed the Homebrew package manager on the Neo and used that to install and mess around with packages such as Python 3, Git, curl, micro, and FFmpeg. Everything worked quickly and as expected, since that’s pretty light usage for beginning coders.
For more experienced coders who might want to try building an app in Xcode, we recommend the MacBook Air. Dave also installed the Scrivener writing app onto the Neo and loaded it with about 2,000 PDF files that occupied 1.8 GB of storage. The Neo lagged when importing the files, but they used only about 60% of its memory capacity once imported, which left enough headroom for him to browse the internet on a few tabs.
The keyboard and trackpad are pleasant and reliable. Though the Neo’s keyboard omits a backlight, and its physical trackpad lacks haptic feedback — both of which are standard features on more expensive MacBooks — the Neo doesn’t feel like a less useful laptop in the absence of those frills. Cheap Windows laptops, for comparison, tend to have mushy keyboards and rattly trackpads with poor palm rejection that results in unintentional clicks. We didn’t experience any of those issues with the MacBook Neo.
The Neo has more than enough battery life to survive a full day of classes or work. It lasted 14 hours in our web-browsing battery test, in line with the $850 HP OmniBook Flip X 14 (which we’ve seen on sale for $500 to $550). Our sub-$500 Windows laptop picks lasted around 9 hours in the same test, just enough for a full day of work or classes but not much more. (And battery life degrades over time.) But be sure to keep the Neo’s screen at about a third of its full brightness for a good mix of usability and battery life — at full brightness the Neo’s battery lasted only around 6 hours.
It has iMessage, FaceTime, Photos, and Notes, like any other MacBook. One of the best features of a Mac laptop is the way it works alongside other Apple devices, such as an iPhone or iPad. You can see your texts synced between your laptop and phone with iMessage, make and receive FaceTime calls, edit photos saved on iCloud, or mirror and use your entire iPhone on the Mac desktop. You can even use your iPhone as an upgraded webcam for the Neo.
Apple makes it easy to get support and repairs. If your Neo breaks, or if you need help from an expert, you can go to any of hundreds of Apple stores in the United States and across the world for repairs, replacements, or tech support. And repairing the Neo is cheaper in comparison with fixing Apple’s other laptops, costing just $150 for accidental damage and $50 for screen damage with AppleCare+ coverage (an additional $50 per year or $140 for three years), versus $300 and $100, respectively, for the MacBook Air.
For other budget laptops, like cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks, getting any support at all can be difficult; if something breaks in your device, there’s no such thing as a local Acer or Asus store, for instance. And because those laptop makers release so many different models, they do not always have the parts on hand to complete repairs.
Budget laptops aren’t reliably in stock — but the Neo is. Cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks constantly blip in and out of stock. Prices fluctuate wildly. And models are frequently discontinued just months after being introduced. Apple, in contrast, has a long track record of making its products reliably available at a predictable price, which is a game changer for laptop shoppers on a budget.
