Apple MacBook Neo review: can Apple's cheapest laptop be a good buy for photographers?

Once upon a time, the MacBook Air was the cheapest way to get yourself an Apple laptop. Then the MacBook Neo came along and changed all that. It’s much cheaper than even the entry-level 13-inch Air, while being about the same size and weight (though the Air is still thinner) and produces a level of performance from a CPU formerly seen in the iPhone 16 Pro that, while not comparable to anything running Apple’s latest M5 chip, is perfectly capable of carrying out many common photo-editing, and even video-editing, tasks. The MacBook Neo is very definitely the bottom rung on the MacBook ladder, and doesn’t get some of the advanced features you’ll see on those further up, but for its price it offers excellent build quality, the bulletproof macOS operating system, and just enough battery life to keep going all day. It’s never going to be on the list of the best laptops for video editing, but if you won’t use all that extra computing power, the Neo might be just the laptop you need.

Apple MacBook Neo: Specifications

Apple MacBook Neo: Price

Starting at just £699/$699, the MacBook Neo looks like a bargain. For that money, you get 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. There's only one upgrade option through the Apple Store, which doubles the SSD storage to 512GB. Adding this to your laptop also changes the screen lock key at the top right of the keyboard into a fingerprint reader, but that’s it: there's no option to expand the laptop’s RAM or add extra GPU cores as there are on the MacBooks Air and Pro. Even the nano-texture display coating is absent. Still, this makes the Neo cost a lot less than the entry-level Air, and you could buy two of them for the price of a basic MacBook Pro and still have enough left over for some nice headphones. Windows laptops at this price point tend to be uninspiring too, which is not something you can say about the Neo.

Apple MacBook Neo: Design & Handling

Most Apple laptops look the same, with the MacBook Pro standing out slightly thanks to having its name etched in its base. The MacBook Neo doesn’t have this, so you’ll need to identify it by its colour: as well as silver, the Neo is available in a metallic green called ‘Citrus’ and a rather lovely Indigo alongside the pinkish Blush and standard silver - and in a nice touch, the OS will match its window edges and default wallpaper to the exterior colour. It’s noticeably thicker than a MacBook Air, but has the same aluminium casing as all MacBooks, with its USB-C ports tucked away at the back on the right up by the screen hinge. As a 13-inch laptop, it’s easily portable and could make the ideal companion on hikes if you’re accompanied by a drone or action camera.

This is a very basic laptop, and as such doesn’t come with any of the bells and whistles you may expect from a Mac. The version reviewed here is at the bottom of the range, so it doesn’t have the fingerprint reader. This means you’d better get used to typing your password every time you need to unlock it. The webcam is a 1080p FaceTime HD model rather than the clever Center Stage cam that’s on the Air and Pro, which can track you around and keep you in shot. As such, it’s fine, but you may feel you’re missing out. There are two speakers, hidden under slits in the sides of the casing rather than grilles at the edge of the keyboard, and they’re fine too. As is the dual-mic array, though you may find yourself making use of the 3.5mm audio jack for a headset if you’re making a lot of calls.

The screen is an LED-backlit IPS with fewer pixels in it than the equivalent 13-inch MacBook Air, and yet again, it’s absolutely fine but nothing special. That’s the story of this laptop. If you need more screen, one of the USB ports supports a single external monitor of up to 4K, though both that and the built-in screen are limited to 60Hz.

The ports are possibly the thing about the Neo that will annoy photographers and videographers the most. There are only two, and one is a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C. It doubles as the video out, and there's no HDMI port or SD card reader, so some sort of dock may be a good purchase alongside the Neo if you don’t want to be constantly plugging and unplugging peripherals. That’s because the second USB port, despite being Type-C, is only USB 2.0. This is an artefact of the A18 Pro chipset inside the Neo, which comes from the iPhone 18 Pro, a phone with only one port. There's no way to tell the difference between the two USB ports (eventually you’ll get used to the fact that the slower one is closer to you), but the operating system will warn you if you plug a fast peripheral into the wrong one. You can charge through either port - there's no MagSafe - and this may well be enough connectivity for most users, as networking is handled by Wi-Fi 6E and there's Bluetooth 6 for your headphones, as well as connecting an external mouse and keyboard.

Apple MacBook Neo: Performance

The tiny A18 Pro has had the misfortune to make its laptop debut in a world that already includes the M5, as well as innumerable choices from Intel and AMD. It’s a really competent CPU, especially in terms of single-core performance, in which it produces strong benchmark scores.

It’s still a six-core chip though, and only two of those are the ‘performance’ type that do the heavy lifting. This is made worse by the 8GB RAM limit, another legacy of the iPhone. Apple has clever caching and memory management tech that allows it to make the best of its allocation of memory, but more is always better, and with PC manufacturers pushing out mobile workstations with as much as 128GB on board, 8GB looks puny.

This doesn’t stop the Neo, but it does slow it down. The SSD inside is running rather slowly by 2026 standards, around the speed of an older PCIe 2.0 drive, which naturally makes any paging from RAM to storage feel less responsive. The Neo isn’t a laptop that was designed for heavy video editing work, but it runs Premiere Pro reasonably well, churning through GPU effects (there are only five graphics cores inside, which is actually one less than the iPhone 16 Pro had) and raw video conversion at a slower speed than other laptops. Denoising 60MP raw image files in Lightroom likewise takes ages. However, it got there in the end rather than crashing and failing the task, which says something about the robustness of the platform Apple has assembled here.

The strong single-core performance from the A18 Pro (3,519 in Geekbench 6, which puts it ahead of the Apple M3 and just about every Intel or AMD chip I’ve ever tested) means it’s a responsive machine to use, and in Photoshop it’s perfectly happy cropping, resizing, cloning and carrying out all the basic tasks photographers demand. Its multi-core performance is in Intel Core i5 territory, and that’s an i5 from a couple of years ago too. Once again: it’s fine. We weren’t really expecting Core Ultra 9 levels of computing power from something that costs £599.

Apple MacBook Neo: Verdict

When the MacBook Neo was announced, the idea of a laptop that ran on the processor from an iPhone seemed almost ridiculous. However, time spent with the machine shows that it works, and it works well. There are things that could be better - that 8GB unified RAM pool is going to look tiny to many users, especially those who demand more than that just for their graphics cards, but the Neo isn’t a laptop made for gamers or 8K video editors. For browsing, office tasks and most image editing it does just fine, the lack of ports and internal storage a bigger issue. What you get is a nicely built Mac for a lot less than the next model up, and that means the Neo has real value.

Alternatives

Mac Mini

If portability is not a priority, the Mac Mini is a much more powerful way into Apple’s ecosystem. You will need to add your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but in return, you get far more connectivity and performance, making it a better fit for photographers editing regularly at a desk.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 15 Aura

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 15 Aura is a strong Windows alternative if you want something similarly slim and travel-friendly, but with a larger 15.3-inch display. DCW praised its lightweight, strong battery life, and highly specified screen, which make it an appealing photo-editing laptop on the go.