Many of us wonder if the MacBook Neo is 'the one'.



Because I have a faster desktop (currently a M4 Max Mac Studio), I've always used a lower-end Mac laptop, like the iBook or MacBook Air, for travel. I've used MacBook Pros in the past, but I like the portability of smaller, cheaper models.
In fact, my favorite Mac laptop ever was the 11" Air.

Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling reviews the MacBook Neo, a budget Mac laptop using an iPhone chip, purchased as a replacement for his wife's aging 2016 MacBook Pro. The Neo offers solid value under $600 with good build quality, speakers, and trackpad, but has notable limitations: one USB 2 port, 8GB RAM, slower internal storage, and significant CPU throttling under sustained load. Benchmarks show GPU performance on par with M1, and small LLMs run at ~20 tokens/second. For light users doing web browsing and document work, it's a great fit. For video editing or heavy workloads, the M4 Air remains the better choice.

Can the MacBook Neo replace my M4 Air?