JD's 2026 MacBook Neo Review
After a few days of using the 512GB MacBook Neo with TouchID, here are my impressions after some heavy, real-world use. I'll disclaim this review by saying that I consider myself a power user; on my main workstation, I use many applications, Docker, virtual machines, developer IDEs, open many browser tabs, etc. But that is not what I bought this machine for, nor how I have been using it. My intended use case for this machine is as a backup machine for occasional noodling on the couch or in the kitchen. YouTube, browsing, email, text editing, Slack, and Teams chats.
I've owned an iPad Pro that has served this purpose for years, but I find I rarely take it out of its keyboard case or use it in portrait mode. I've basically been using an aging iPad as a limited, top-heavy laptop. A small Mac is way more practical (and can actually be cheaper) than an iPad Pro with a keyboard case. So a MacBook Neo? It seemed like a suitable purchase. The big question I had to answer for myself, however, is this: Is the cost savings of a Neo worth it compared to the similar but superior MacBook Air?
Look And Feel
There's no mistaking it — The MacBook Neo feels very much like an Apple product. It was designed with a clear, obsessive attention to detail. The colour is nice, elegant, and looks impressive under bright lights. I got "Indigo". While I think of indigo as having a purple hue, this colour is a desaturated blue-gray that reminds me of an old pair of blue jeans. Understated but not boring. The keycaps and even feet on the bottom are tinted to a matching hue. The chassis feels premium, solid. You can use one thumb to flip open the screen easily — and this sounds mundane, but you don't know you miss that until you use a lesser laptop with a hinge that requires you to awkwardly pry open the lid with both hands every time you use it. The Neo is just nice.
One interesting detail that is so very Apple — they rounded the top corners of the actual display for some reason. Not just the software but, like, they literally cut off the corners of the screen, just like they've been doing on iPads and iPhones recently. So in some cases, a few pixels will be cut off of an application in full screen. Not a big deal, but it's worth noting.
A tiny detail: The underside of the chassis states, in small print:
Designed by Apple in California A2 Model A3404
Product of Vietnam
The country of origin is interesting, as it seems to represent Apple's push to reduce its reliance on China and diversify its manufacturing.
The Display
The Neo has a nice, glossy 2408x1506 display that renders at 1408x881 points at 500 nits. It looks pretty good, but feels slightly fuzzy to me — I can tell it's not rendering natively at its full resolution, though macOS is good at scaling, so you don't notice unless you're looking for it. It is noteworthy that the 13" MacBook Air also doesn't render at its native resolution out of the box, although it has a slightly bigger display. Overall, the screen is good. The reflectivity is annoying when a light source is behind you, but it's still plenty bright enough to read outdoors if you angle the screen to minimize glare. The top two corners are rounded to inlay perfectly with the chassis's rounded corners. There's no additional top area with a notch for the menu bar like Apple's high-end laptops. Some people are so irrationally annoyed by the notch that they may consider it a benefit, though in practice, it means you're losing desktop real estate to the menu bar.
The Speakers
I played some music through the Neo's built-in speakers, and they are fine. Nice sounding, not a lot of bass, but audio is clear and loud enough for regular laptop use. These aren't going to blow you away like the MacBook Pro speakers, but they are absolutely passable for watching YouTube videos and basic computer tasks.
The Keyboard
The keyboard is good. Nice to type on, basically feels like other recent MacBook keyboards. It's much better than the keyboards of the older TouchBar generation of laptops that most people hated. But here's where there's a big feature missing: backlighting. Every other Apple laptop has a backlit keyboard, but the Neo doesn't. It's some aggressive cost-cutting at play. One of my primary use cases is using this in bed at night while my wife sleeps. On the one hand, the lack of a backlight reduces the computer's brightness in the bedroom, but it also makes it harder to use. For regular typing, I'm 100% a touch typist. But entering long passwords with cryptic characters on shift+number keys? Annoying. I find I'm fumbling more than I expected to. For someone who can't touch-type and regularly uses their computer in the dark, I could see this being a deal-breaker.
The 512GB model I have includes TouchID. Sometimes it's nice. I haven't found TouchID very reliable on Macs so far — they seem to forget my fingerprint after a few days. But I could live without it since my Apple Watch also unlocks the device.
Trackpad
Apple has the best trackpads in the industry. Windows laptop trackpads have gotten better in recent years, but they haven't caught up. Apple's haptic trackpads are amazing, and I even own three of the Magic Trackpad 2 because I love them so much. The Neo isn't that. Apple has a pretty good design that distributes force around the trackpad to a button in the middle. It's okay. It's easy to use. It's a little louder than I'd like, and I miss the ability to adjust the clicking force in software, as you can on the haptic trackpads. In my view, this is a drawback, not a deal-breaker, since you can turn on tap-to-click.
Performance
Speed and performance are where things are a little hit-or-miss. Infamously, the Neo only has 8GB of RAM, which is a little scant for a real work machine in 2026. And since macOS has a good swap/paging story, it's mostly okay. But when setting this machine up, running a dozen apps, having lots of tabs open — yeah, the memory pressure will be a thing. I rarely show much free RAM on this machine in Activity Monitor — and that's not inherently a problem — but this thing is going to chug if you push it. For my use as a light text-editing/web browsing/emailing machine, that could suffice, but if I try to get real work done on this machine or install Docker, it's going to be painful.
Honestly, though, the RAM situation might not even be the most annoying aspect of this machine's performance — it's the SSD. The SSD on this machine benchmarks at about 1.5 GB/s, while the M5 MacBook Air can hit 7GB/s. That's a 4x difference! If you're doing anything disk-intensive — copying files around, installing software, performing heavy writes — you'll feel it. I've had a beachball more than a few times on this machine in a few days, especially when I was installing a ton of things and getting it set up. That's… not great in 2026. It was somewhat common on the netbook I hackintoshed in 2009, but I shouldn't be seeing that regularly from even a budget machine in 2026.
Connectivity
For ports, MacBook Neo only has one USB3.2 Gen2 10Gb port and one USB2 port. That means I can connect only one external monitor (limited to 4K) and only to the rear-most port. I'm not planning to connect it often, but I do have a Studio Display I can use with this and a pair of LG 5K monitors at the in-laws. It'd be nice to be able to plug those in and use them properly, but the Neo just can't do it. That right there might be the single biggest deal-breaker on the machine. If this had two Thunderbolt ports, that'd be fine. But as it is, the connectivity story is a bit sad.
The wireless situation is also not cutting-edge — WiFi 6, which is just okay. I'd hope for at least 6e in 2026, ideally WiFi 7 — which the M5 Air has, but not the Neo.
Battery Life and Charging
The battery life is good. Can I use this for multiple days without thinking about it? Probably not. On paper, the Air has slightly better battery life. Using it on the couch and in bed for several hours has not been a problem. I'm not a MagSafe zealot, so I can live without that connector — using ubiquitous USB-C cables I have lying around is usually easier. This machine doesn't have MagSafe, if that matters to you.
Charging is a little on the slow side as well, and I believe the specs indicate that the Neo draws a maximum 30W. (And only a 20W brick is included in the box, but just be thankful Apple hasn't completely taken away the included chargers as they have in Europe!) So it's not going to charge super quickly. It negotiates 45W USB-C PD.
Conclusion
The MacBook Neo is a really nice machine at a compelling price. Apple cut corners (figuratively and literally). Except maybe for the backlit keyboard and ports, they mostly cut the right ones. It feels like table stakes to offer proper support for Apple's own 5K displays, and get both ports up to USB-3.2 Gen2 (I retch whenever I have to type that). That way, you'd never have to think about which port works with which devices.
For me, a 256GB machine is insufficient. So I got the $849 CAD (Education pricing) 512GB with TouchID. The next step up would be a base model MacBook Air for an additional $510 CAD. That's a pretty big jump over $849 — but here's what I'd get and — totally arbitrarily, what I might value each thing at.
$100: Thunderbolt 4 & Dual External 6k display support
$30: Slightly bigger, better, internal display with auto brightness and TrueTone
$20: Slightly longer battery life and faster charging
$10: MagSafe Port
$5: Almost 1mm thinner chassis
$80: Double the RAM (16GB)
$40: Faster WiFi 7
$70: About 4x faster SSD
$50: Backlit Keyboard
$40: Nicer haptic trackpad
$5: Slightly better speakers
Total: $450. Not quite $510 but... very close. Each of those things is nice. Any one or two on their own could be dismissed. But the total overall package is going to be considerably nicer for someone who loves computers and uses theirs all the time.
That said, I bought this machine for one simple reason: I need a computer I can leave lying around the house and use in bed. I have a young kid running around who will mercilessly attack it. I'd be devastated if a tiny tyrannical toddler tossed my very expensive MacBook Pro. So a 'disposable' machine that's mostly good enough seems compelling — this machine is cheap enough that damage to it would be a bad day, not a bad month. And yet, overall… I think there's too much I'm leaving on the table, and a few too many compromises in the Neo for me. Since I actually would appreciate all the additional features the Air offers, it seems like a no-brainer for someone like me to get the Air instead.
Let's hope the next generation Neo includes a backlit keyboard and better ports — those two things alone would make a future Neo a much easier machine to recommend.
Hands off my laptop, baby!
