Amazon [amazon.com] has
Apple 2026 MacBook Neo 13-inch Laptop with A18 Pro chip, 8GB, 256GB SSD for
$589.99.
Shipping is free.
Apple rized price by $100. Amazon still has old prices.
- 256GB | Magic Keyboard
- 512GB | Magic Keyboard with Touch ID
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Community Reviews
Apple's 13 inch Neo looks like a budget MacBook aimed at light school and everyday use, with the A18 Pro chip and 8GB memory handling email, video calls, browsing, papers, and other basic tasks well. The price jump makes the current $589.99 deal feel attractive, especially versus the education store at $599 and higher priced MacBook Air options. It is also described as fine for travel and casual work, with enough speed for many college needs. The main caution is that it is not a true M series Mac, so heavier multitasking, sustained workloads, and demanding classes may be better served by a MacBook Air.
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20 Comments
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$600 is still an excellent deal. When I was in college in the early 2010s, I had a chunky Dell with a 3rd-gen Intel Core i5, 8GB DDR2 RAM, mechanical drive, and 2-hour battery. The Neo puts it to shame.
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A friend just bought one, and it was struggling with nothing more than Zoom, Safari, and Slack.
You're paying MacBook money for what's basically an iPhone 16 Pro chip—not even Apple's current iPhone chip—instead of a real Mac chip.
If all you do is browse the web, it's probably fine. But if you actually work on your laptop, skip it. Spend the same money on a refurbished M2 or M3 MacBook Air instead. Best Buy has refurbished M2 Airs for around $699, and it's not even a close comparison.
On the other hand, there can be much more demanding classes for college then there was back then. A 2010's flip phone was probably $120 at most, where phones now usually $300+.
Benchmarks show that the A-series used in the Neo has multicore performance comparable to the base M1 used in the first generation of Apple Silicon Mac, which, though released in 2020, was ahead of its time and is still perfectly usable. They show that it has pretty good single core performance: not cutting edge, but close enough. Both metrics are important, but single core is often more important for lower-end performance since it's what determines responsiveness on a system that isn't overloaded. By contrast, multicore indicates how well it can handle multitasking or more complex workloads.
The caveat to all of this is that the A-series is designed for use in phones, which means it must operate within very tight thermal and power limitations. It accomplishes that by allowing spikes of speed followed by significant throttling. This kind of tuning is crucial for a phone, but overkill for a laptop that can handle much more heat and provide much more power, and it's unclear why Apple didn't adjust this behavior for the Neo (possibly, it wasn't practical to do). Benchmarks often don't capture this kind of behavior because they're meant to measure many different types of performance in a short period of time, so they don't run long enough to trigger meaningful throttling.
Anyway, the end result is a system that's fine for many uses, especially if more demanding tasks are intermittent, but might not perform as well for longer, intensive use due to phone-specific thermal/power tuning. As others have said, every MacBook Air since 2022 has had superior performance in general, and every MacBook Air since 2020 has had superior performance period when it comes to intensive use. The Air also has a better screen, better connectivity (2x Thunderbolt vs 1x USB3 and 1x USB2), better support for external displays (with further improvements in later generations), and generally better quality all around.
TL;DR the Neo is a fine computer but almost never an overall better computer than any post-2020 MacBook Air. It's often possible to find a superior MacBook Air for ~the cost of a Neo.
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A friend just bought one, and it was struggling with nothing more than Zoom, Safari, and Slack.
You're paying MacBook money for what's basically an iPhone 16 Pro chip—not even Apple's current iPhone chip—instead of a real Mac chip.
If all you do is browse the web, it's probably fine. But if you actually work on your laptop, skip it. Spend the same money on a refurbished M2 or M3 MacBook Air instead. Best Buy has refurbished M2 Airs for around $699, and it's not even a close comparison.
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Share your experience with the Slickdeals community
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