Apple's cheapest laptop is an unusual object: an ultraportable built around the A18 Pro, a mobile chip inherited from the iPhone 16 Pro whose production costs are already amortised, aimed squarely at office work. It reaches the entry level of the Mac range through concessions that cannot be ignored — starting with 8 GB of memory.
Overview
The industry is in one of its deepest crises, and Apple has still managed a surprise: a new laptop that is genuinely affordable. The Neo is arguably the clearest illustration of the strategy the company has followed for a decade — controlling the production chain end to end, unifying hardware development around Apple Silicon and software around its own ecosystem.
Having established itself as the reference in mobile workstations and lifestyle laptops, Apple is now attacking the budget segment. The question this machine poses is whether the concessions it makes are the right ones.
Design and build quality
Put the Neo beside a MacBook Air and the differences are hard to spot. The devil is in the details: the Neo's dimensions are slightly more contained at 29.7 × 20.6 × 1.27 cm, with a smaller display at exactly 13 inches.
At 1.22 kg it feels notably dense in the hand without being heavy — though Apple remains a step behind rivals such as Asus and Samsung in the ultralight race. It still opens with one finger, which remains a small engineering pleasure.
Our test unit came in the Citrus colour, and the logo is no longer glossy.
Keyboard, trackpad and connectivity
The smaller chassis has consequences. The trackpad loses height — 7.2 cm against 8 cm on the Air — and, more significantly, changes technology entirely.
For the first time in years the trackpad clicks mechanically, physically depressing into the chassis rather than using the haptic feedback of Apple's other laptops. The sensation is inevitably different: a little more definite, and not unpleasant once you have had an afternoon to adjust. The audible feedback is much more present, which is simply what a mechanical trackpad does.
The keyboard keeps the Magic Keyboard's scissor switches and the dry, satisfying action typists like. The keycaps are now pale rather than black, the keys are about half a millimetre larger, and the legends are printed rather than moulded — which has the practical benefit of hiding fingerprints better than the Air and Pro do. The keyboard is not backlit.
Connectivity takes a step backwards. There is no MagSafe power port, and only two USB-C ports — which are emphatically not equivalent to one another.
The port on the left, farthest from you, is certified USB 3.1 with a theoretical 10 Gbit/s and DisplayPort support. The other is limited to USB 2 — a standard now 26 years old — with a ceiling of 480 Mbit/s, or about 60 MB/s. In practice that makes the slower port the one to give your charging cable, leaving the faster one for storage and hubs. Apple has anticipated the confusion: plug a drive into the slower port and macOS raises a notification telling you it is not the fast one, which is a genuinely smart touch.
External display support is limited to one monitor at up to native 4K and 60 Hz, so a Studio Display is out of the question — which would in any case be an odd way to prioritise your spending.
Wireless blows hot and cold. There is no N1 chip, so you get Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 6 rather than Wi-Fi 7.
And there is no cooling at all. The A18 Pro is passively cooled, which makes the Neo completely silent. Even with all six cores working, the keyboard did not exceed 41 °C, and the rear shell stayed below 36 °C — so on your lap it warms rather than burns.
Performance: good enough, but clearly bounded
The A18 Pro brings six CPU cores and five GPU cores alongside 8 GB of unified memory, and that configuration caused a good deal of comment. Does it still hold up in 2026, in an era of Electron-built applications and ever-hungrier browsers? The answer is yes — provided you understand what this ultraportable was designed for.
On the test's CPU score of 58, the Neo performs very strongly against other laptops in its price bracket; only the Dell 14 Plus with a Core Ultra 7 258V edges past it, and at the cost of hardware concessions of its own. That is the Neo's central advantage over the wider market: robust, premium construction plus the Apple ecosystem.
In office use there is little to criticise. A whole weekend alternating web browsing and word processing, with spreadsheet work and Discord alongside, passed without trouble — macOS handles caching intelligently, on the principle that unused memory is wasted memory.
It is not a games machine. Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the Very High preset managed an average of 15 fps at 1200p. There were also occasional fleeting stutters when moving the cursor over the menu bar, which could not be correlated to any CPU spike — a software bug or a panel refresh issue, unresolved either way, though it does not affect ordinary use.
The other black mark is storage. Where the MacBook Air now has a much faster module than before, the Neo goes backwards: sequential speeds of 1.4 GB/s reading and 1.5 GB/s writing. Those figures do not hold back general responsiveness or everyday application launches, but large file transfers and heavy software loads take longer than they should.
Memory is not upgradeable, so you choose the configuration once and live with it.
Display, audio and battery
The 13-inch panel is well calibrated and bright in every respect — one of the machine's genuine strengths rather than a cost-cut compromise. Audio is likewise a strong point for a laptop at this level.
Battery life is honourable: a day, but not more than a day.
Repairability and value
There has been improvement on repairability, which is worth acknowledging in a category where the trend has generally run the other way.
The value argument rests on what you are actually buying: excellent build quality, a well-calibrated 13-inch panel, an excellent keyboard-and-trackpad combination, silence in use and honourable battery life — set against theoretically weak performance for the price bracket, a glossy panel, no upgradeability whatsoever and connectivity that feels antediluvian.
Verdict
The Neo is the most interesting cheap laptop Apple has made, and the concessions are legible rather than hidden. Buy it for the build, the screen, the keyboard and the silence. Think hard before buying it if you need more than 8 GB of memory now or later, if you rely on MagSafe, or if two USB-C ports of unequal capability will constrain how you work.
It is a genuinely good machine at the entry level of the range — provided the entry level is where your work actually lives.
