MacBook Neo Review: is it an upgrade from the 2020 M1 MacBook Air?
I’ve been testing out the MacBook Neo for over a week now, and I am confused by its performance. It works well (great in fact!), but now I wonder if I need more than this. I have been using the base model M1 Air for over 3 years now, and I don’t see the need to upgrade. If I do upgrade, the Neo would be on my list. Even a discounted M4 Air is overkill for me.
I got the base model MacBook Neo for testing, so both my Air and the Neo have 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
Chassis and design
Compared to the M1 Air, the design is a huge shift. Instead of a wedge shaped laptop with sharp corners, you get a flat design with rounded curves and edges. It doesn’t have a range of depth unlike the M1 Air, with a thicker back tapering to a thinner front end. Somewhere along the line my M1 Air got a bend in the chassis, not sure how or if it was that way from day one, but if I place it down on a flat surface, it definitely wobbles even though it has all 4 rubber feet in place. It’s not huge, but definitely noticeable. The Neo is flat and has no flex or wobble and feels just as premium as Apple’s most expensive laptops. If you were to really press hard on the lid of both laptops (or any laptop for that matter), you would notice some flex and notice the lid pushing in, but it’s an unnatural amount of push. For the record, the flex is more on the M1 Air.
I would argue that the design is even more premium in some ways, such as the keyboard. It seems counterintuitive to call the keyboard more premium even though it has no backlight, but the change to lighter, colored keycaps matching the color aesthetics of the laptop gives it a fun and premium look. Apple could have slapped a white keyboard for all 4 colors and it still would look nice, but they went out of their way to colorize the keys. Very cool.
You also get color-matching USB-C pins, a feature usually reserved for premium devices. Once again, very cool.
Overall, the design is great and very surprising for a $599 laptop. It is a joy to hold and gives you confidence when holding it with its sturdy chassis and consistent dimensions front to back. The M1 Air is still light and great to hold, but you only feel comfortable and confident holding it from the thicker hinged side since that angle doesn’t fight your finger grip. Try holding a big wedge of cheese from the thin side, and you’ll know what I mean.
Keyboard
Having no backlight not only helps with lowering the price and repairability, but it also makes perfect sense for the lighter colored keys. If the keys were backlit, the letters on the keys would have to be translucent, and that translucency in normal daylight or office lighting would be disastrous for readability. The shimmering lights would bounce off the keys making the light keys and now light letters invisible and therefore unreadable. I noticed that a lot when fondling over other laptop brands in the past, with their silver keys with translucent letters being almost unreadable with proper room lighting.
Don’t get me wrong. I would prefer a backlight and I do miss it everyday, but the keyboard contrast is great enough that you can see the keys from the screen’s light. This is also a good time to motivate anyone who complains about the lack of backlighting to learn how to properly type, especially all these influencers who are still pecking away at their keyboards. If pecking is your only hope, don’t get the Indigo color because it has the darkest keys. The keyboard contrast is much better on Silver, Blush, and Citrus. I can confirm that after using my niece’s Blush model and comparing it side by side in the dark with my Indigo test model.
Trackpad
The trackpad is also newly engineered to provide good tactility, even though it is a mechanical trackpad and not the more premium Force Touch. It is the first mechanical trackpad in a MacBook since 2015. Fun fact - Apple did release a mechanical trackpad in 2020 in the form of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. I have an iPad Pro from that era along with the Magic Keyboard case, and the mechanical trackpad works fine without any issues many years later. The one on the Neo feels like it has a deeper click, but it feels just as solid and would be delightful for anyone who isn’t a fan of the haptic trackpad Apple currently uses. If you’re used to Force Touch, you will notice the Neo’s trackpad does slow you down just a hair since your finger is physically traveling (albeit maybe 2mm), compared to no travel with Force Touch.
Another fun fact - the trackpad is 7% of the total weight of the MacBook Neo, which is crazy. I believe Apple had to make the trackpad a mechanical one with a lot of weight (twice the weight of the Force Touch trackpad on the M5 Air), in order to keep the weight balance right and allow for the one-finger lift.
The one-finger lift. Ah yes, the tell-tale sign of a premium product. It’s still there and better than ever.
Display
The display is slightly smaller than an M1 Air (0.3 inch diagonal shorter) and won’t be missed. On an M2 Air and above it is 0.6 inches shorter, which will be missed, but these aren’t the target markets. The target market is Chromebooks and budget windows laptops and in that market, you will find bigger screens, but you won’t find quality, high-res screens with 500 nits of brightness. It even gets brighter than the M1 Air which maxes out at 400 nits. Chromebooks usually max out at 1080p at this price point, and you could even end up with washed out displays that shift colors really easily causing more eye strain than watching C-SPAN.
Speakers
Speaker quality is equal to my M1 Air, and I really couldn’t tell the difference between the two, which is a good thing because they do a more than adequate job. They are side firing instead of top firing, but it doesn’t affect the quality. If you cup your hands on the sides right by the speakers, you get a bit deeper bass as you reroute the audio upwards. The headphone jack is closer to the front compared to the back, which gives you some extra slack.
Performance
Coming from the M1 Air, I don’t see a noticeable difference between the two devices even though my M1 Air has dual NAND chips with faster read and write speeds to the SSD. That means if I am running low on RAM and have to borrow internal storage as RAM, technically my M1 Air would be faster, but again I am not noticing any difference in performance between the two because Apple has done some things under the hood to mitigate the memory swap issue plaguing the base model M2 Air with a single NAND chip. Whether you get 256GB or 512GB on the Neo, you will only have single channel memory, with less “highways” for data transfer. I would still opt for the 512GB model since you get the benefit of Touch ID which has its perks and security benefits.
So what exactly do I do to “push” this laptop? I have many stock apps open at any given time, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Calendar, Safari with 12+ tabs, News, Photos, and it just flies through my workload without a hitch. Playing 4K videos in Photos, while playing a 4K video in YouTube and editing images in Canva on Safari didn’t lead to any slow downs and is beyond a realistic workload for me. Even with nearly 4GB of swap memory, things were moving along fine. This laptop will surprise you with its capabilities, and is ideal for someone who is starting off as a simple, basic user that wants to delve into more ambitious projects as they learn new tools and creative apps. Ambition and creativity are part of the Neo’s theme, amplified by its built in hardware-accelerated ray tracing that will really smoke the M1 Air out of Apple’s walled garden.
Battery life
Apple quotes 16 hours of battery life vs 18 hours on all previous Airs including the M1 Air, so a slight decrease. The main issue however is charging speed. The Neo maxes out at 30W of charging, but you need a separate charger brick since the one supplied in the box is a 20W brick. More intensive tasks like 3D rendering and gaming will deplete the battery quickly, and it will take longer to charge it to full since it doesn’t support fast charging. If you’re coming from an M1 Air, the battery charging experience will be about the same since both the M1 Air and the Neo don’t support MagSafe 3 fast charging.
The great news - you can use battery banks to charge this laptop with ease due to the relatively low wattage requirements.
Who is this laptop for?
This laptop is for many types of people, and most people will fit into one of these categories:
Someone new to macOS, and just wants a cheap way to get into the Apple walled garden after already being a dedicated iPad and iPhone user. They want to take the jump into familiar yet unfamiliar territory by having a proper computer to manage school, life, and/or work.
A nice “beater” laptop for professionals who work on Macs that costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars and want a secondary machine for those days where they are doing more admin type of work.
Any student looking to get a laptop for school or college will be fine with a Neo.
Anyone upgrading from a Chromebook will appreciate the extra power and higher fidelity screen.
M1 Air owners whose laptop is on its last legs from a physical perspective - this is the best lateral move. I’ll say it again - I’ve been using the M1 for over 3 years now as a daily driver, and this laptop can easily handle everything the M1 can. If you give me enough time, I might see a beach ball, but I have seen one beach ball in nearly 10 days. Think of the Neo as a lateral job promotion - you don’t get a pay raise, but you love your new job and don’t want to go back.
Finally, if you’re using an Intel MacBook Air, the benefits are insane when you jump to the Neo. You get the promotion at work with a serious pay raise, and you love the job.