MacBook Neo Review: A Real Mac for £599

I Stopped Using My iPad After a Week With the MacBook Neo

The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Back in 2015, the A9 chip in the iPhone 6S was benchmarking comparably to MacBook Airs from two years prior. At the time it felt like a curiosity. In hindsight, it was a straight line to where we are now - a £599 laptop running the A18 Pro, the same chip Apple put in the iPhone 16 Pro, and a machine that competes with everything else at this price on every metric that matters.

I've been using the MacBook Neo as my main machine for the past week, running macOS Tahoe. Not as a secondary device I pick up occasionally - as the computer I reach for first, and last, every day. I expected it to hold up fine. What I did not expect is that I'd stop reaching for my iPad entirely.

The 8GB Conversation Is Over

Before anything else: yes, 8GB of unified memory sounds tight in 2026. I know. I also have a MacBook Pro with significantly more RAM sitting on my desk, so I came into this with opinions.

Here is what I found after a week of actual use. I kept a dozen apps open. I did not close Safari tabs I would not otherwise close. I did not quit things in the background to make room. The machine never hitched. Everything stayed snappy. The 8GB conversation matters on paper and in benchmarks. In practice, for the work the MacBook Neo is designed for, it does not show up in day-to-day use.

If you are the kind of person who genuinely needs more memory - heavy video work, virtual machines, running everything simultaneously - you already know that, and the M5 MacBook Air is where you should be looking. But if you are buying a £599 laptop, the Neo's memory is not the issue people online want it to be.

What Actually Surprised Me

The display is bright and sharp - exactly what you would expect from a Liquid Retina panel, and genuinely impressive for this price. The speakers are side-firing and sound far better than they have any right to at £599. Battery life is long; I did almost all my testing unplugged and it kept up without drama.

The trackpad deserves a specific mention. It is a mechanical click rather than the haptic version on the MacBook Air and Pro - it physically moves when you press it. Apple used this as a cost-saving measure, and I understand why people would flag it as a compromise. But it does not feel like one. You can click anywhere on the surface and it responds cleanly. Multi-finger gestures work exactly as you would expect. It just feels normal, which is about the best thing you can say about a trackpad. Note that Force Touch is missing - that hard-press shortcut for Look Up and similar actions is not there - but for anyone who has never used it, or used it rarely, there is nothing to miss.

The keyboard is the same Magic Keyboard layout, now with colour-matched keycaps depending on which finish you chose. It feels good - crisp and punchy. The one cut that will genuinely bother some people is the lack of backlighting. I type without looking at the keys, so I have not felt it, but if you regularly work in low light it is something to factor in.

The One Thing That Actually Annoyed Me

There is no ambient light sensor. The MacBook Neo has an option in System Settings to automatically adjust brightness, but without a sensor to drive it, it does not work well. Over the course of a week, I found myself manually adjusting screen brightness for the first time in years - maybe for the first time in a decade of daily MacBook use. Within a few days I had F1 and F2 committed to memory, which tells you everything about how often I was reaching for them.

That is genuinely it. Everything else on the compromise list - no hardware camera indicator light, no CenterStage, the larger bezels - none of it has bothered me in practice. The second USB-C port running at USB 2.0 speeds is frustrating if you think about it too hard, but most people buying a £599 laptop are not transferring large files to external drives at high speed every day. macOS does warn you if you plug a display or fast drive into the wrong port, which helps.

One other small gripe: the box includes a 20-watt USB-C charger - the same one that ships with iPads - and a white 1.5-metre cable that is not colour-matched to the machine. MacBook Airs and Pros come with 2-metre MagSafe cables. At £599 it is hard to complain too loudly, but it is worth knowing. The Neo does charge faster if you plug it into a higher-wattage adapter.

Why I Stopped Reaching for My iPad

Here is the thing I did not anticipate. My setup for the last several years has been a MacBook Pro at my desk, an iPhone in my pocket, and an iPad with a Magic Keyboard for everything in between - reading on the sofa, working from the kitchen, carrying around the house.

After a week with the MacBook Neo, I have not touched the iPad once. Not because I made a deliberate decision to avoid it - I simply never needed it.

The numbers are worth spelling out. An 11-inch iPad Air plus Magic Keyboard starts at around £870. An iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard starts at £1,300 for the 11-inch. And despite the smaller screen, an iPad in a Magic Keyboard case weighs more than you might expect - the 13-inch models with keyboards actually weigh more than a 2.7-pound MacBook Neo. You are paying more, carrying roughly the same weight, and using a version of iOS with a windowing interface bolted on rather than a full desktop operating system.

The MacBook Neo is not an iPad killer for everyone. If you draw with a Pencil, or you are deep in a workflow that depends on iPadOS, it is not the answer. But for people like me - who use an iPad primarily as a portable Mac alternative with a keyboard - it raises a genuine question about whether that use case still justifies the cost.

Does Apple Have a Bigger Gap to Fill?

The MacBook Neo sits in an interesting place in the lineup. Think of it as Apple's equivalent of the iPhone 17e - the accessible, mass-market entry point. The MacBook Air is the default choice for most people, like the iPhone 17. The MacBook Pros are for those who need the most from their hardware, like the Pro models.

What is missing, and what I find myself wanting, is something akin to the iPhone Air - a MacBook that is genuinely, absurdly thin and light. Apple made that machine once before, with the 2015 MacBook. It weighed just over 2 pounds and tapered to 3.5mm at its thinnest point. The performance, driven by Intel's Core M chip, was the compromise that held it back. That problem no longer exists. Apple Silicon is fast, cool, and physically small enough to sit inside an enclosure far thinner than the Neo's 12.7mm. A 2-pound MacBook with A-series or M-series performance at a Neo-adjacent price would be something genuinely new.

As it stands, the Neo is 2.7 pounds - the same as the 13-inch MacBook Air - and it has a slightly smaller footprint. It is not an ultralight, it is a sensibly sized everyday laptop. That is fine, and for most people it is exactly what they need.

Who the MacBook Neo Is Actually For

The obvious audience is students, first-time Mac buyers, and people switching from Windows. The Neo serves all of them well - better build quality, better display, and better performance than anything near this price in the Windows world.

But there is a second audience that is easy to miss: people with more powerful primary setups who want a capable secondary machine they can carry around without thinking about it. The Neo is the post-Jony Ive version of that idea. Where the 2015 MacBook was a design statement that served a relatively small audience at a semi-premium price, the Neo is a mass-market product built to be practical above all else. It is a tool, and a good one, and it happens to come in four colours.

If you are picking one up and want to make sure it is set up well from day one, my post on the best free Mac apps is a good place to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the MacBook Neo good enough as a primary computer?

For most people, yes. Web browsing, document work, video calls, photo editing at a hobbyist level, and streaming are all handled without any noticeable issues. If you need sustained heavy workloads, the MacBook Air or Pro is the better choice.

Can the MacBook Neo replace an iPad?

It depends on how you use your iPad. If you rely on Apple Pencil or touch-native apps, no. If you primarily use your iPad with a keyboard for portable computing, the MacBook Neo is worth serious consideration - it runs full macOS, has a full-size keyboard, and costs significantly less than an iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard.

Does the MacBook Neo work well without keyboard backlighting?

The white colour-matched keys help somewhat in low-light conditions, but it is not a substitute for actual backlighting. If you regularly work in dim environments, factor it in before buying.