The $599 MacBook Neo Sounds Too Good — Here Is What You Actually Give Up

The Apple MacBook Neo is a $599 Mac laptop with an A18 Pro chip, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, and four color options that look genuinely good in person. For students, the education price drops to $499, which is half the cost of the MacBook Air M5. That price gets you into macOS with Apple Intelligence, a full aluminum chassis, and enough performance for the browsing-documents-streaming workflow most people actually live in. But “affordable Mac” and “no-compromise Mac” are two very different things, and Apple made specific cuts to hit this price that you should understand before you hand over your credit card.

While I appreciate what Apple accomplished at this price point, the MacBook Neo is not a shrunken MacBook Air. It is a new product category built around trade-offs that will matter to some buyers and barely register for others. The question is not whether the Neo is good — at $599 it is clearly the best budget laptop available — but whether the specific features Apple removed are ones you personally need. I think most first-time Mac buyers and students will be perfectly happy. Power users looking for a travel secondary machine might not be.

What the A18 Pro Chip Actually Delivers at This Price

The A18 Pro inside the MacBook Neo is the same chip that powers the iPhone 17 Pro lineup, repurposed for a laptop with active cooling and a higher thermal ceiling. You get a 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, a 5-core GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and a 16-core Neural Engine that runs Apple Intelligence features locally. Memory bandwidth sits at 60 gigabytes per second, which is less than half the M5’s 120 gigabytes per second but adequate for single-app workflows.

In practice, the A18 Pro handles Safari with twenty-plus tabs, Pages documents, Keynote presentations, and FaceTime calls without hesitation. Apple claims up to 50 percent faster performance than comparable Intel systems for everyday tasks, and early reviewers like Engadget have confirmed that the Neo makes “$600 Windows PCs look embarrassing.” Where you notice the chip’s ceiling is in sustained multi-core workloads: Final Cut Pro exports, large Xcode projects, and running multiple professional apps simultaneously. This is not the chip for that workflow — the MacBook Air M5 is, and our detailed MacBook Neo versus MacBook Air M5 comparison covers exactly where the performance gap lands.

One detail worth keeping in mind: the 8 gigabytes of unified memory is the hard ceiling. There is no configuration with more RAM. Both the $599 and $699 models ship with 8 gigabytes, period. For web browsing, media consumption, and document work, 8 gigabytes is fine today. Whether it remains fine in three years is the real gamble. macOS has historically been efficient with memory management, but Apple Intelligence features will only grow more demanding over time.

The Keyboard Situation Is the Biggest Surprise

The MacBook Neo is the first Apple laptop in more than fifteen years to ship without a backlit keyboard. The keys themselves are full-size and use the same scissor mechanism as the MacBook Air, which means the typing feel is solid — the travel is shallow but deliberate, and you bottom out cleanly without any mushiness. But type in a dim room or on an evening flight, and you are navigating by memory alone. There is no ambient light sensor either, so the display will not auto-adjust to compensate. Apple clearly prioritized cost savings over low-light usability here, and I find that a strange choice given how many students work late at night.

Thankfully, the physical build quality does not suffer. The aluminum unibody has the same premium feel as every other Mac, and the color-matched keyboard surrounds look sharp across all four finishes. The mechanical trackpad — which physically clicks rather than using Apple’s haptic Force Touch technology — is another visible downgrade, but honestly, for basic navigation and gestures it works fine. You lose pressure-sensitive features like Force Click to preview links, but most casual users never discovered those gestures anyway.

Ports, Charging, and the MagSafe Question

The MacBook Neo has two USB-C ports and a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. That sounds reasonable until you learn the two USB-C ports are not equal. The left port is USB 3 with 10 gigabits per second data transfer and DisplayPort 1.4 output. The right port is USB 2, limited to 480 megabits per second. That is a forty-fold speed difference depending on which side you plug into, and there is no visual indicator on the chassis to tell them apart. You just have to know. Apple’s support documentation for the MacBook Neo confirms this asymmetry, and it is the kind of gotcha that catches people off guard when transferring large files from an external drive.

MagSafe is absent entirely. Charging happens through either USB-C port using the included 20-watt adapter, which is the slowest charger Apple ships with any current Mac. If you already own a higher-wattage USB-C charger from a MacBook Air or Pro, it will work — some reviewers tested with a 96-watt adapter and saw modest improvements — but fast charging is not officially supported. The real concern with no MagSafe is physical safety: in a dorm room, a classroom, or a coffee shop, a tripped cable pulls the entire laptop off the table. MagSafe exists specifically to prevent that, and its absence on the most student-oriented Mac Apple has ever built is a puzzling omission.

Display and Camera: Good Enough With One Clear Gap

The 13-inch Liquid Retina display runs at 2408 by 1506 resolution, 219 pixels per inch, and peaks at 500 nits — identical brightness to the MacBook Air M5. For text, web browsing, and video playback, it looks crisp and clean. The gap is color: the Neo’s panel covers the sRGB gamut but not the wider P3 color space that the Air and Pro both support, and True Tone automatic color temperature adjustment is missing. If you edit photos or video professionally, the narrower gamut matters. If you write essays, stream lectures, and browse the web, you will never notice the difference.

The 1080p FaceTime HD camera is functional but noticeably behind the 12-megapixel camera in the MacBook Air. You lose Center Stage (which keeps you framed during video calls as you move) and Desk View (which shows your desk surface during calls). Video calls look acceptable in good lighting, but in a dim dorm room the image quality drops off faster than the Air’s larger sensor. For Zoom lectures and FaceTime with family, it is adequate. For content creation or professional video calls, the Air’s camera is substantially better.

Who Should Buy the MacBook Neo — and Who Should Save for the Air

The MacBook Neo makes the most sense for three groups of people. First, students who need a Mac for schoolwork and cannot justify $1,099 for the Air. At $499 with the education discount, the Neo is genuinely transformative — it puts macOS, Apple Intelligence, and a full aluminum laptop in the hands of people who previously had to choose between a Chromebook and a bottom-shelf Windows machine. Second, families who want a shared household Mac for web browsing, email, and streaming. Third, anyone who already owns a MacBook Pro or Air and wants a lightweight secondary machine they will not worry about damaging. If you do pick up the Air instead, our MacBook Air M5 setup guide walks through the hidden settings worth enabling on day one.

I think you should save for the MacBook Air M5 if any of these apply: you work in dim lighting regularly, you rely on external drives or docks that need Thunderbolt, you edit photos or video beyond casual use, or you plan to keep this laptop for more than three years. The Air’s 16 gigabytes of RAM, Thunderbolt 4 ports, backlit keyboard, and P3 display are not luxuries for those workflows — they are requirements. The $500 difference between the Neo and the Air buys you genuine capability that compounds over years of ownership.

The MacBook Neo is not Apple cutting corners out of laziness. It is Apple making deliberate trade-offs to reach a price point that fundamentally changes who can afford a Mac. Some of those trade-offs — the keyboard backlight, the MagSafe omission — feel like they land on the wrong side of the line. Others — the mechanical trackpad, the sRGB display — are honest compromises that most buyers at this price will never notice. The fact that the tech industry is calling this “the most disruptive product Apple has made in a decade” tells you how significant that $599 price tag really is. Would you trade a few features for the cheapest Mac laptop Apple has ever built?