Apple MacBook Neo: the best budget laptop you can buy

Apple MacBook Neo two-minute review

The MacBook Neo is one of the most interesting releases from Apple in a long time, and it comes at an important moment. Thanks to a global memory shortage, a tariffs-loving president in the White House, and other global conditions, consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive, just as the cost of living has also risen, which means consumers have less money to spend on things like a new laptop.

Apple is generally regarded as a company that sells high-end and expensive devices, which isn’t entirely fair, as I think the Mac mini (M4) is one of the best-value products in the computing space. The MacBook Neo is interesting, as Apple is entering the budget and midrange laptop market for the first time. This is a market that's dominated by cheap Chromebooks and affordable Windows 11 laptops, and while Apple is joining the fray with the MacBook Neo, it’s doing so on its own terms.

That means, as the company is keen to emphasise, that while the MacBook Neo is a more affordable MacBook, it is in no way a cheap, pared-back or limited MacBook.

You’re still getting a solid and great-looking laptop made out of aluminum (and now in four new colors, harking back to the more fun days when Apple launched brightly-colored Macs), and a bright and vibrant screen with a retina resolution of 2408 x 1506, which is higher (and therefore more sharper and detailed) than the 1080p screens laptops at this price usually sport.

Audio from the built-in speakers is also excellent, the 1080p webcam means video calls look great, and perhaps best of all, the MacBook Neo runs the full version of macOS, and you can run pretty much any Mac app on it.

While its 8GB of unified memory means you won't see the best performance when running multiple apps at once, overall I had no issues at all running various apps for day-to-day tasks, making it ideal for students in particular.

Best of all is the price: $599 / £599 / AU$899. You’re going to be hard-pushed to find a Windows laptop or Chromebook around this price that can match the build quality and performance of the MacBook Neo; and if you're a student, you can get a further discount that brings it down to just $499 / £499. At that price, it really is a no-brainer.

Of course, there are compromises. As well as the limited amount of memory, the MacBook Neo doesn’t come with a backlight behind the keyboard, so finding the right keys in darker environments can be an issue, and the two USB-C ports use older and slower USB 3 and USB 2 tech.

Despite those compromises, Apple has made easily the best budget laptop you can buy in 2026. While it’s not the cheapest laptop out there, it’s well worth paying a little extra to get such a slick and accomplished laptop at this price. Windows 11 laptop and Chromebook makers have been put on notice, and they’ll need to up their games to match, let alone surpass, the MacBook Neo.

Apple MacBook Neo: Price & release date

• Starts at $599 / £599 / AU$899
• Available to pre-order now, on sale March 11

The biggest selling point of the MacBook Neo is its price, with Apple seemingly pulling out all the stops to keep the price as low as possible.

With a starting price of just $599 / £599 / AU$899 (and a further $100 / £100 discount for education users), this is one of the cheapest Macs Apple has ever made. Sure, the Mac mini (M4) is more powerful, and launched at the same price, but it doesn’t come with a screen, mouse or keyboard, so for sheer out-of-the-box value for money, the MacBook Neo now reigns supreme.

For that starting price you get a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD. The Neo is powered by the Apple A18 Pro chip, with a 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU. The A18 Pro debuted in 2024 in the iPhone 16 Pro, and the fact that the MacBook Neo is powered by an older mobile chip, rather than one of the M-series chips usually found in Macs, is one of the ways Apple has kept the overall price of the MacBook Neo down.

Customization options for the hardware are pretty limited as well, with just the option to double the storage to 512GB for an extra $100 / £100 / AU$200. Considering the current price of storage, this isn’t an obscene amount to pay for an extra 256GB of the stuff — and by going for the larger storage option you also get a Touch ID button on the keyboard that allows you to log in to macOS, pay for things via Apple Pay and more using your fingerprint. This is not an option with the base model of the MacBook Neo.

The $599 / £599 / AU$899 starting price firmly pits the MacBook Neo against the best budget laptops, such as the HP Chromebook Plus 15.6-inch and Acer Aspire Go 15 — the first time in a long, long, time that I can say that about a MacBook, and Apple’s build and design quality easily surpasses almost every budget laptop or Chromebook at this price point.

The arrival of the MacBook Neo also means the MacBook Air is no longer the cheapest MacBook model, which makes the new, more expensive, price of the just-announced MacBook Air (M5), which now starts at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799, a slightly less bitter pill to swallow. Slightly.

While I love the fact that you can now get a MacBook for $599 / £599 / AU$899, the value proposition of the Neo lives or dies on how many compromises Apple has had to make to keep the price low.

One last thing to note here is that in the UK and EU, the MacBook Neo does not come with a charger, just a USB-C cable, as is the case with the M5 MacBook Pro from last year and the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra. It’s likely we’ll see an increasing number of laptops in the UK and EU not ship with chargers in a bid to reduce e-waste — if you don't already have a USB-C charger you’ll need to buy one.

• Price: 5/5

Apple MacBook Neo: Specs

Apple MacBook Neo: Design

• Available in four colors
• No backlit keyboard
• USB 2 and USB 3 ports

Apple has done an excellent job of ensuring that, despite its lower price, the MacBook Neo retains the look, feel and build quality that we’ve come to expect from Apple devices; and when it comes to design, the MacBook Neo blows pretty much all of the competition at this price point out of the water.

Thanks to its aluminum build the MacBook Neo feels solid, robust and impressively premium. It comes in four vibrant colors, and the review sample Apple sent me is the Citrus version, which is a nice bright-looking green. I also had the chance to check out the other colors at the launch event: Silver is the iconic Mac color, Blush is a lovely pinkish shade and Indigo is a dark blue.

As with the iMac redesign a few years ago, it’s great to see Apple return to releasing fun and colorful Macs, and while the MacBook Neo variants look bright, there’s a metallic sheen to them which means they don’t resemble toys.

The aluminum chassis means the MacBook Neo isn’t quite as light as you might imagine. At 2.7 pounds (1.23kg) it weighs the same as the MacBook Air, and while that’s certainly not a hefty laptop (hence the ‘Air’ moniker), students and kids lugging the MacBook Neo around might notice the weight. It’s also thicker than the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Neo’s Magic Keyboard is slightly colored to match the hue of the laptop, which, as Apple says, creates “a cohesive design aesthetic and [makes] MacBook Neo the most colorful MacBook yet.”

Speaking of the keyboard, it’s here where one of the big differences between the two models of the MacBook Neo can be found. If you go for the more expensive model with 512GB storage you also get a Touch ID button for signing into macOS using your fingerprint. It’s a shame that this is limited to the pricier model, as I find Touch ID to be really convenient — you can also use it to approve installations, insert passwords and make payments — and there are plenty of budget laptops out there that support biometric security.

The base model instead comes with a ‘lock’ button that you can press and hold to lock the MacBook Neo, which is far less useful.

While the keyboard of the MacBook Neo feels as comfortable to use and responsive as the Magic Keyboards on more expensive Macs, it does lack a very important feature: backlighting.

On other MacBooks, the keyboard backlights illuminate the letter or icon of each key, making them easy to see in low-light conditions. Without backlighting, typing can be more difficult if you’re not in a suitably lit environment, even if, like me, you’re a proficient typer who doesn’t usually need to look at the keyboard.

It’s arguably the biggest sacrifice Apple has made in order to keep the MacBook Neo’s price as low as possible, and while it's not a deal breaker, it’s definitely worth noting, and in dark and poorly lit classrooms and lecture halls the lack of backlighting could become an issue.

Along the left-hand side of the MacBook Neo are two USB-C ports, which are also used to charge the laptop (there’s no fancy magnetic MagSafe 3 port here). While the two USB-C ports are indistinguishable from each other, or from the USB-C ports found on other MacBooks, it’s important to note that both use different, and older, tech.

The USB port nearest the back of the MacBook Neo uses USB 3, which maxes out at 10Gb/s. For comparison, the new MacBook Air M5 comes with Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can handle up to 40Gb/s, and the most recent MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max up that tech to Thunderbolt 5, which can handle 120GB/s.

So, while the USB 3 port on the MacBook Neo can handle modern peripherals (such as mice and keyboards), moving large files to and from an external hard drive will be noticeably slower than on many other modern laptops. You can at least plug in a USB-C monitor and use it as a second screen, with support for 4K and 60fps.

The second USB-C port uses the even older USB 2 interface, which limits speeds to just 60MB/s, which is far slower, and only really appropriate for wired keyboards and mice.

This is another big indicator of the MacBook Neo’s (relatively) low price, and while I can understand that Apple needed to make some sacrifices, it could have handled this a bit more elegantly. For a start, having two seemingly identical ports that use very different technology could cause confusion — you might wonder why your USB memory stick is suddenly very slow, or why a peripheral isn’t working correctly if you connect them via the wrong port.

Also, while using USB 3 technology is an understandable cost-cutting measure (Apple is likely banking on most people not noticing the low speeds compared to more modern USB technology), including USB 2 in a laptop in 2026 feels close to insulting, no matter how cheap the device is.

To be fair to Apple, the rest of the design of the MacBook Neo is free from those kind of compromises. As I’ve mentioned, the aluminum body makes it look and feel far more premium than pretty much any other laptop at this price point, and the screen is another highlight. At 13 inches, and with a resolution of 2408 x 1506, the display might not be the biggest or sharpest screen in Apple’s lineup, but on a laptop in this price range it’s a fantastic addition, considering that most Windows 11 and Chromebook rivals at this price will be limited to 1080p or even lower. The 13-inch screen also helps to make the MacBook Neo nicely portable, especially for kids and students. Perhaps the best thing about the Neo’s display is its brightness — it's able to hit the same 500 nits of peak brightness as the screen on the MacBook Air.

For anyone who's used a budget laptop and been disappointed by the dim or washed-out image quality, the MacBook Neo’s screen is impressively bright and vivid, and with support for one billion colors (and that higher-than-usual resolution), the MacBook Neo easily has one of the best, if not the best, displays on an affordable laptop — though, Apple being Apple, it’s not a touchscreen.

• Design: 4/5

Apple MacBook Neo: Performance

• Uses the same A18 Pro chip that powered the iPhone 16 Pro
• Can run macOS apps
• 8GB of memory is a concern

The MacBook Neo is one of Apple’s most interesting releases in years, and while it uses a chip built by Apple, unlike the other modern MacBooks it’s not an M-class chip; instead it's the A18 Pro, which originally appeared in the iPhone 16 Pro.

Putting a smartphone chip into a laptop might seem odd, but the logic is sound. For a start, Apple has been making mobile chips for a lot longer than it’s been making computing chips (by around 10 years), and the mobile chips it makes these days, especially for its high-end Pro iPhones, are impressively powerful — and you could argue that a powerful mobile chip like the A18 Pro is more capable than a weak laptop chip like those found in many budget devices.

By going with an older iPhone chip, Apple is able to keep the price of the MacBook Neo lower without impacting the performance too much.

But why not use an older computer chip like the M1? As Apple explained to me, the A18 Pro features a 16-core Neural Engine that can handle on-device AI features, including Apple’s much-hyped Apple Intelligence, which is baked into macOS. The M1 chip, which debuted with the MacBook Air in 2020, isn’t able to handle those tasks as well – and it also uses faster memory. So, despite my initial reservations about Apple using a mobile chip for the MacBook Neo, it’s actually quite a shrewd move.

As the A18 Pro is also a 64-bit Arm-based chip, you don’t have to worry about only being able to run iPhone apps on the MacBook Neo. Instead, you can run any Mac app that can run on modern MacBooks.

macOS itself runs well, and while it doesn’t feel quite as snappy as when I’m using my MacBook Pro, considering the price difference I was impressed. Because of the less powerful hardware in the MacBook Neo, for the best results it’s worth sticking to the default apps as much as possible – so rather than loading up Ableton Live 12 and launching a project full of various sounds and instruments, I stuck to the pre-installed Garage Band instead.

While it’s a more basic music making application, it’s still got plenty of great features, and it ran without an issue on the MacBook Neo. Other default apps, such as Keynote, used for presentations, also ran well.

If you want to try more intensive apps then you certainly can. As I mentioned earlier, despite running on an iPhone chip, the MacBook Neo can run any Mac app – I even installed Steam, which requires Rosetta to run on non-Intel hardware. You get the same macOS experience as you’d get on the similarly priced Mac mini, as well as ultra-expensive MacBook Pros or the Mac Studio.

So, there are no limits like with ChromeOS on Chromebooks, where you can only run limited Android apps, or a relatively small selection of Chrome apps. Some budget laptops also come with ‘Windows 11 in S mode’ – a typically terrible Microsoft name, and which is essentially a locked-down version of Windows 11 that can only run apps bought or downloaded through the Microsoft Store, and you’re stuck with using Edge as the default browser.

The MacBook Neo suffers from none of this, so in theory you’ll be able to run any app that you could do on a more expensive Mac. It means it’s a far more versatile device than a Chromebook or Windows 11 S laptop, and I’d argue that it’s more useful than the iPad Pro, which despite being far more powerful (and uses the latest Apple M5 chip), can only run iPadOS apps, rather than full Mac applications.

You can also use your iPhone or iPad with the MacBook Neo, in the same way you can with more expensive apps. So, you can mirror the screen of your iPhone, drag and drop files, make calls and messages, share the clipboard and use an iPad as a second screen. I paired the MacBook Neo up with the latest M5-powered iPad Pro (an unlikely pairing, I’d admit, considering the price difference between them), and used the iPad Pro as a second monitor, and it worked brilliantly.

So, I have to give Apple major props when it comes to ensuring that users of the MacBook Neo do not get a compromised or limited macOS experience – instead, you get the same experience other Mac owners have, and that’s great to see on a more affordable device.

The only limits, then, is of the MacBook Neo’s hardware itself, so while you could fire up Blender and work on complex 3D scenes, the Neo is going to struggle, so you need to keep your expectations in check.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the A18 Pro chip, I do worry about the 8GB of unified memory, which could limit how future-proof the MacBook Neo will be.

Due to the global memory shortage, which is raising the price of memory, it was an inevitability that the MacBook Neo would come with a limited amount to keep the overall price down – and in many ways, I was relieved that we got 8GB rather than 4GB (which some Chromebooks and even some budget Windows 11 laptops still come with).

However, 8GB of system memory doesn’t go very far these days, and there’s no option to upgrade the MacBook Neo to have more, and you certainly can’t easily open up the laptop and install more memory yourself.

With my MacBook Neo running Safari, Keynote, Garage Band and downloading a game through Steam, around 6.48 – 7GB of memory was being used at once – pretty darn close to the 8GB limit. Once you max out the MacBook Neo’s memory, like any laptop, things start slowing down considerably.

The MacBook Neo, like other modern Macs, uses unified memory, which means that 8GB of memory is shared between the system and graphics, so loading up more graphically-intensive tasks puts even more pressure on the memory.

If you’re going to be using a laptop for graphically intensive workloads, or you like to multitask and switch between numerous apps, you’d be much better off investing in the MacBook Air (M5) instead, which comes with 16GB of unified memory to start.

Again, the memory limits of the MacBook Neo can be avoided by keeping in mind what the MacBook Neo has been designed for – and what it hasn’t. Sticking to more basic apps, and only having a few of them open at once, will ensure you have an enjoyable experience.

If you’re not prepared to do that, then the MacBook Neo simply isn’t for you – but good luck finding at laptop at this price that will be able to keep up with your ambitions.

The MacBook Neo can also play games, though again you’ll need to keep your expectations in check. However, I got it to run Cyberpunk 2077 at a perfectly playable 30fps (frames per second) using the ‘For this Mac’ preset. Usually a stunning-looking game, on the MacBook Neo it wasn’t quite as impressive due to most graphical presets being set to ‘low’ – or turned off entirely (such as advanced ray tracing lighting effects), but even the fact that it was playable on a 13-inch laptop for $599 was very impressive. You can also play iPhone and iPad games, and those are much better suited to the MacBook Neo’s hardware.

Overall, the performance of the MacBook Neo is very impressive for the price, and excels at day-to-day tasks, and is flexible enough for you to run most Mac apps without an issue, but if you want a productivity power house, look elsewhere.

One last thing to note is that like the MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo has a fanless design, which means it’s practically silent when in use, another big difference from budget Windows 11 laptops that often get noisy when the fans whirr into life.

• Performance: 4/5

Apple MacBook Neo: Battery life

• Apple claims up to 16 hours of video streaming
• 11 hours of wireless web browsing
• Hit 13 and a half hours in our tests

The MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro chip is an efficient bit of silicon, which isn’t surprising as it was designed to power a smartphone, and Apple promises up to 16 hours of video streaming on a single charge – two hours less than what it promises for the MacBook Air, but still an ambitious target.

In our battery life tests it managed to last 13 and a half hours before shutting down, which is more than enough for lasting an entire work or school day, though there are Chromebooks out there that can go for much, longer.

This makes it a great laptop for students who don’t want to have to hunt for a power socket between lessons. Charging the MacBook Neo is fast as well using the 20W power adapter that’s included (unless you’re in the UK or EU, in which case you don’t get an adapter).

• Battery: 4/5

Should I buy the Apple MacBook Neo?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

How I tested the MacBook Neo

• Used it for almost a week
• Ran various apps
• Used it alongside an iPad Pro and other Macs

After seeing the MacBook Neo at Apple’s launch event, I was given a unit to thoroughly test. I’ve been using the laptop every day during my review, using it for a variety of day to day uses such as document creation and browsing the internet.

I also used various apps, including Garage Band, to push the MacBook Neo, and played a bit of Cyberpunk 2077. I also linked the MacBook Neo up to an iPad Pro and my Mac Studio to test out how the MacBook integrates with other Apple products.

I’ve reviewed almost every modern MacBook during my time at TechRadar, as well as other Macs and iPads, plus plenty of Chromebooks and Windows 11 laptops as well, and have used this experience to help me judge whether or not the MacBook Neo is worth buying.

• Read TechRadar’s reviews guarantee
• First reviewed: March 2026