Apple Mac Book Neo: the best budget laptop you can buy | Tech Radar

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Apple Mac Book Neo: the best budget laptop you can buy

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The Mac Book Neo is the best budget laptop you can buy right now. While its price is at the higher end of what I’d consider 'budget', the design, build quality and performance are all leagues ahead of its Windows and Chromebook competitors. I particularly like how there’s been no compromise when it comes to mac OS — you can run any Mac app or connect your i Phone up to the Mac Book Neo, just as you can with far more expensive Mac products, and the screen also blows the budget competition out of the water. However, sacrifices have been made when it comes to the USB-C ports, lack of keyboard backlight and limited unified memory, which although understandable are also a shame.

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The Mac Book Neo is one of the most interesting releases from Apple in a long time, and it comes at an important moment. Thanks to a global memory shortage, a tariffs-loving president in the White House, and other global conditions, consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive, just as the cost of living has also risen, which means consumers have less money to spend on things like a new laptop.

Apple is generally regarded as a company that sells high-end and expensive devices, which isn’t entirely fair, as I think the Mac mini (M4) is one of the best-value products in the computing space. The Mac Book Neo is interesting, as Apple is entering the budget and midrange laptop market for the first time. This is a market that's dominated by cheap Chromebooks and affordable Windows 11 laptops, and while Apple is joining the fray with the Mac Book Neo, it’s doing so on its own terms.

That means, as the company is keen to emphasise, that while the Mac Book Neo is a more affordable Mac Book, it is in no way a cheap, pared-back or limited Mac Book.

You’re still getting a solid and great-looking laptop made out of aluminum (and now in four new colors, harking back to the more fun days when Apple launched brightly-colored Macs), and a bright and vibrant screen with a retina resolution of 2408 x 1506, which is higher (and therefore more sharper and detailed) than the 1080p screens laptops at this price usually sport.

Audio from the built-in speakers is also excellent, the 1080p webcam means video calls look great, and perhaps best of all, the Mac Book Neo runs the full version of mac OS, and you can run pretty much any Mac app on it.

While its 8GB of unified memory means you won't see the best performance when running multiple apps at once, overall I had no issues at all running various apps for day-to-day tasks, making it ideal for students in particular.

Best of all is the price:

599 / £599 / AU

899. You’re going to be hard-pushed to find a Windows laptop or Chromebook around this price that can match the build quality and performance of the Mac Book Neo; and if you're a student, you can get a further discount that brings it down to just $499 / £499. At that price, it really is a no-brainer.

Of course, there are compromises. As well as the limited amount of memory, the Mac Book Neo doesn’t come with a backlight behind the keyboard, so finding the right keys in darker environments can be an issue, and the two USB-C ports use older and slower USB 3 and USB 2 tech.

Despite those compromises, Apple has made easily the best budget laptop you can buy in 2026. While it’s not the cheapest laptop out there, it’s well worth paying a little extra to get such a slick and accomplished laptop at this price. Windows 11 laptop and Chromebook makers have been put on notice, and they’ll need to up their games to match, let alone surpass, the Mac Book Neo.

The biggest selling point of the Mac Book Neo is its price, with Apple seemingly pulling out all the stops to keep the price as low as possible.

With a starting price of just

599 / £599 / AU

899 (and a further $100 / £100 discount for education users), this is one of the cheapest Macs Apple has ever made. Sure, the Mac mini (M4) is more powerful, and launched at the same price, but it doesn’t come with a screen, mouse or keyboard, so for sheer out-of-the-box value for money, the Mac Book Neo now reigns supreme.

For that starting price you get a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD. The Neo is powered by the Apple A18 Pro chip, with a 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU. The A18 Pro debuted in 2024 in the i Phone 16 Pro, and the fact that the Mac Book Neo is powered by an older mobile chip, rather than one of the M-series chips usually found in Macs, is one of the ways Apple has kept the overall price of the Mac Book Neo down.

The

599 / £599 / AU

899 starting price firmly pits the Mac Book Neo against the best budget laptops, such as the HP Chromebook Plus 15.6-inch and Acer Aspire Go 15, the first time in a long, long, time that I can say that about a Mac Book, and Apple’s build and design quality easily surpasses almost every budget laptop or Chromebook at this price point.

The existence of the Mac Book Neo also means that the Mac Book Air is no longer the cheapest Mac Book model, which makes the new, more expensive, price of the just-announced Mac Book Air (M5), which now starts at

1,099 / £1,099 / AU

1,799, a slightly less bitter pill to swallow. Slightly.

While I love the fact that you can now get a Mac Book for

599 / £599 / AU

899, the value proposition of the Mac Book Neo lives or dies on how many compromises Apple has had to make to keep the price low.

One last thing to note is that in the UK and EU, the Mac Book Neo does not come with a charger, just a USB-C cable, similar to the M5 Mac Book Pro from last year, and the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra. It’s likely we’ll see an increasing number of laptops in the UK and EU not ship with chargers – if you already have a USB-C charger, then you can use that with the Mac Book Neo, otherwise you’ll need to buy one separately.

USB 3 (USB-C) port, USB 2 (USB-C) port, 3.5mm audio jack

0.50 x 11.71 x 8.12 inches (1.27 x 29.75 x 20.64 cm)

Apple has done an excellent job of ensuring that despite its lower price, the Mac Book Neo retains the look, feel and build quality that we’ve come to expect from Apple devices, and just on design, the Mac Book Neo blows pretty much all of the competition at this price out of the water.

Built out of aluminum, the Mac Book Neo feels solid, robust and impressively premium. It comes in four vibrant colors, and the review sample Apple sent me is the Citrus version, which is a nice bright-looking green. I also had the chance to check out the other colors at the launch event. Silver is the iconic Mac color, Blush is a lovely pinkish color and Indigo is a dark blue.

As with the i Mac redesign a few years ago, it’s great to see Apple return to releasing fun and colorful Macs, and while the Mac Book Neo variants look bright, there’s a metallic sheen to them which means they don’t just resemble toys.

The aluminum chassis means the Mac Book Neo isn’t quite as light as you might imagine, and at 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg), it weighs the same as the Mac Book Air. While that’s certainly not a hefty laptop (hence the ‘Air’ moniker), for students and kids carrying around the similarly-weighted Mac Book Neo might feel uncomfortable. It’s also thicker than the Mac Book Air.

The Mac Book Neo’s Magic Keyboard is also slightly colored to match the hue of the laptop, which, as Apple says, creates “a cohesive design aesthetic and [makes] Mac Book Neo the most colourful Mac Book yet.”

Speaking of the keyboard, it’s here where one of the big differences between the two models of the Mac Book Neo can be found. If you go for the more expensive model with 512GB storage you also get a Touch ID button for signing into mac OS using your fingerprint. It’s a shame that’s limited to the pricier model, as I find Touch ID to be really convenient (you can also use it to approve installations, insert passwords and make payments), and there are plenty of budget laptops out there that support biometric security.

The base model instead comes with a ‘lock’ button that you can press and hold to lock the Mac Book Neo, which is far less useful.

While the keyboard of the Mac Book Neo feels as comfortable to use and responsive as the Magic Keyboards of more expensive Macs, it does lack a very important feature: backlighting.

On other Mac Books, the keyboard backlights illuminate the letter or icon of each key, making it easy to type in low light conditions. Without that backlight, typing is a lot more difficult unless you’re in suitably lit environments, even if, like me, you’re a proficient typer that doesn’t usually need to look at the keyboard.

It’s arguably the biggest sacrifice Apple has made to keep the Mac Book Neo’s price tag as low as possible, and while it could have been worse, it’s definitely worth pointing out, and in dark and poorly lit classrooms and lecture halls, the lack of backlighting in the keyboard could become an issue.

Along the left-hand side of the Mac Book Neo are two USB-C ports, which are also used to charge the laptop (there’s no fancy magnetic Mag Safe 3 port here), and while the two USB-C ports are indistinguishable for each other, or other USB-C ports found on alternative Mac Books, it’s important to note that both use different (and older) tech. The USB port nearest the back of the Mac Book Neo uses USB 3, which maxes out at 10 Gb/s. Meanwhile, the new Mac Book Air M5 comes with Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can handle up to 40 Gb/s, and the most recent Mac Book Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max up that tech to Thunderbolt 5, which can handle 120GB/s.

So, while the first USB-C port of the Mac Book Neo can handle modern peripherals (such as mice and keyboards), moving large files to and from an external hard drive can be noticeably slower than other modern laptops. You can plug in a USB-C monitor and use it as a second screen at least, with support for 4K and 60fps.

The second USB-C, however, uses the even older USB 2 interface, which limits speeds to just 60MB/s, which is far slower and only really appropriate for wired keyboards and mice.

This is another big indicator of the Mac Book Neo’s (relatively) low price, and while I can understand that Apple needed to make some sacrifices, it could have handled this a bit more elegantly. For a start, having two seemingly identical ports have very different technology behind them could cause confusion – you might wonder why your USB memory stick is suddenly very slow, or a peripheral isn’t working correctly if you insert them in the wrong port.

Also, while using USB 3 technology is an understandable cost-cutting measure (Apple is likely banking on most people not noticing the low speeds compared to more modern USB technology), including USB 2 in a laptop in 2026 feels far more insulting, no matter how cheap the device is.

To be fair to Apple, the rest of the design of the Mac Book Neo is free from those kind of compromises. As I’ve already mentioned, the aluminum body makes it look and feel far more premium than pretty much any other laptop at this price point. The screen is another highlight. At 13-inches and with a resolution of 2408 x 1506, the display might not be the biggest or sharpest screen in Apple’s lineup, but on a laptop of this price range, it’s a fantastic addition, considering most of its Windows 11 and Chromebook rivals at this price will be limited to 1080p – or lower. The 13-inch screen also makes the Mac Book Neo nicely portable, especially for kids and students. Perhaps the best thing about the Neo’s display is its brightness, managing the same 500 nits of peak brightness as the screen on the Mac Book Air.

For anyone who has used a budget laptop and been disappointed by the dim or washed-out image quality, the Mac Book Neo’s screen is impressively bright and vivid, and with support for one billion colors (and that higher than usual resolution), the Mac Book Neo easily has one of, if not the, best displays on an affordable laptop – though, Apple being Apple, it’s not a touchscreen.

Uses the same A18 Pro chip that powered the i Phone 16 Pro

The Mac Book Neo is one of Apple’s most interesting releases in years, and while it uses a chip built by Apple, unlike the other modern Mac Books, it’s not an M-class chip, instead using the A18 Pro, which originally appeared in the i Phone 16 Pro.

Putting a smartphone chip into a laptop might seem odd, but the logic is sound. For a start, Apple has been making mobile chips for a lot longer than it’s been making computing chips (by around 10 years), and the mobile chips it makes these days, especially for its high-end Pro i Phones, are impressively powerful, and you could argue that a powerful mobile chip like the A18 Pro is more capable than a weak laptop chip found in many budget devices.

By going with an older i Phone chip, Apple is able to keep the price of the Mac Book Neo lower without impacting the performance too much.

But why not use an older computer chip like the M1? As Apple explained to me, the A18 Pro features a 16-core Neural Engine that can handle on-device AI features, including Apple’s much-hyped Apple Intelligence, which is baked into mac OS. The M1 chip, which debuted with the Mac Book Air in 2020, isn’t able to handle those tasks as well – and it also uses faster memory. So, despite my initial reservations about Apple using a mobile chip for the Mac Book Neo, it’s actually quite a shrewd move.

As the A18 Pro is also a 64-bit Arm-based chip, you don’t have to worry about only being able to run i Phone apps on the Mac Book Neo. Instead, you can run any Mac app that can run on modern Mac Books.

mac OS itself runs well, and while it doesn’t feel quite as snappy as when I’m using my Mac Book Pro, considering the price difference I was impressed. Because of the less powerful hardware in the Mac Book Neo, for the best results it’s worth sticking to the default apps as much as possible – so rather than loading up Ableton Live 12 and launching a project full of various sounds and instruments, I stuck to the pre-installed Garage Band instead.

While it’s a more basic music making application, it’s still got plenty of great features, and it ran without an issue on the Mac Book Neo. Other default apps, such as Keynote, used for presentations, also ran well.

If you want to try more intensive apps then you certainly can. As I mentioned earlier, despite running on an i Phone chip, the Mac Book Neo can run any Mac app – I even installed Steam, which requires Rosetta to run on non-Intel hardware. You get the same mac OS experience as you’d get on the similarly priced Mac mini, as well as ultra-expensive Mac Book Pros or the Mac Studio.

So, there are no limits like with Chrome OS on Chromebooks, where you can only run limited Android apps, or a relatively small selection of Chrome apps. Some budget laptops also come with ‘Windows 11 in S mode’ – a typically terrible Microsoft name, and which is essentially a locked-down version of Windows 11 that can only run apps bought or downloaded through the Microsoft Store, and you’re stuck with using Edge as the default browser.

The Mac Book Neo suffers from none of this, so in theory you’ll be able to run any app that you could do on a more expensive Mac. It means it’s a far more versatile device than a Chromebook or Windows 11 S laptop, and I’d argue that it’s more useful than the i Pad Pro, which despite being far more powerful (and uses the latest Apple M5 chip), can only run i Pad OS apps, rather than full Mac applications.

You can also use your i Phone or i Pad with the Mac Book Neo, in the same way you can with more expensive apps. So, you can mirror the screen of your i Phone, drag and drop files, make calls and messages, share the clipboard and use an i Pad as a second screen. I paired the Mac Book Neo up with the latest M5-powered i Pad Pro (an unlikely pairing, I’d admit, considering the price difference between them), and used the i Pad Pro as a second monitor, and it worked brilliantly.

So, I have to give Apple major props when it comes to ensuring that users of the Mac Book Neo do not get a compromised or limited mac OS experience – instead, you get the same experience other Mac owners have, and that’s great to see on a more affordable device.

The only limits, then, is of the Mac Book Neo’s hardware itself, so while you could fire up Blender and work on complex 3D scenes, the Neo is going to struggle, so you need to keep your expectations in check.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the A18 Pro chip, I do worry about the 8GB of unified memory, which could limit how future-proof the Mac Book Neo will be.

Due to the global memory shortage, which is raising the price of memory, it was an inevitability that the Mac Book Neo would come with a limited amount to keep the overall price down – and in many ways, I was relieved that we got 8GB rather than 4GB (which some Chromebooks and even some budget Windows 11 laptops still come with).

However, 8GB of system memory doesn’t go very far these days, and there’s no option to upgrade the Mac Book Neo to have more, and you certainly can’t easily open up the laptop and install more memory yourself.

With my Mac Book Neo running Safari, Keynote, Garage Band and downloading a game through Steam, around 6.48 – 7GB of memory was being used at once – pretty darn close to the 8GB limit. Once you max out the Mac Book Neo’s memory, like any laptop, things start slowing down considerably.

The Mac Book Neo, like other modern Macs, uses unified memory, which means that 8GB of memory is shared between the system and graphics, so loading up more graphically-intensive tasks puts even more pressure on the memory.

If you’re going to be using a laptop for graphically intensive workloads, or you like to multitask and switch between numerous apps, you’d be much better off investing in the Mac Book Air (M5) instead, which comes with 16GB of unified memory to start.

Again, the memory limits of the Mac Book Neo can be avoided by keeping in mind what the Mac Book Neo has been designed for – and what it hasn’t. Sticking to more basic apps, and only having a few of them open at once, will ensure you have an enjoyable experience.

If you’re not prepared to do that, then the Mac Book Neo simply isn’t for you – but good luck finding at laptop at this price that will be able to keep up with your ambitions.

The Mac Book Neo can also play games, though again you’ll need to keep your expectations in check. However, I got it to run Cyberpunk 2077 at a perfectly playable 30fps (frames per second) using the ‘For this Mac’ preset. Usually a stunning-looking game, on the Mac Book Neo it wasn’t quite as impressive due to most graphical presets being set to ‘low’ – or turned off entirely (such as advanced ray tracing lighting effects), but even the fact that it was playable on a 13-inch laptop for $599 was very impressive. You can also play i Phone and i Pad games, and those are much better suited to the Mac Book Neo’s hardware.

Overall, the performance of the Mac Book Neo is very impressive for the price, and excels at day-to-day tasks, and is flexible enough for you to run most Mac apps without an issue, but if you want a productivity power house, look elsewhere.

One last thing to note is that like the Mac Book Air, the Mac Book Neo has a fanless design, which means it’s practically silent when in use, another big difference from budget Windows 11 laptops that often get noisy when the fans whirr into life.

The Mac Book Neo’s A18 Pro chip is an efficient bit of silicon, which isn’t surprising as it was designed to power a smartphone, and Apple promises up to 16 hours of video streaming on a single charge – two hours less than what it promises for the Mac Book Air, but still an ambitious target.

In our battery life tests it managed to last 13 and a half hours before shutting down, which is more than enough for lasting an entire work or school day, though there are Chromebooks out there that can go for much, longer.

This makes it a great laptop for students who don’t want to have to hunt for a power socket between lessons. Charging the Mac Book Neo is fast as well using the 20W power adapter that’s included (unless you’re in the UK or EU, in which case you don’t get an adapter).

The Mac Book Neo offers exceptional value for money – especially for students thanks to a $100 discount.

It looks and feels a lot more premium than you’d usually find on a laptop at this price, and its display is similarly impressive. The lack of a keyboard backlight and slow USB ports are a shame, however.

You get the full-fat mac OS experience here, and day-to-day tasks pose no trouble at all – but the 8GB of memory means multitasking is less smooth.

16 hours promised, and 13 and a half in our tests are more than enough for going a whole work or school day without needing a charge.

You want an affordable laptop These days, finding a laptop under $600 that’s worth buying is extremely difficult, but the Mac Book Neo makes it easy – this is a brilliant laptop for the price.

You want to get into the Mac ecosystem Many people with i Phones or i Pads don’t have a Mac Book, and the Neo’s low price means this is a brilliant choice for your first Mac.

You are a student I really don’t think I can recommend any laptop over the Mac Book Neo for students. It’s solidly built, has a long battery life and performs well, and with the student discount offered by Apple, it’s even better value for money.

You’re a creative professional The Mac Book Neo is aimed squarely at students, small business owners, and regular folk. If you need a laptop for some heavy-duty creative work, get a Mac Book Pro instead.

You want to stick with Windows 11 If you really don’t want to use mac OS, then there are some great Windows 11 alternatives, but none at this price feel quite as good as the Mac Book Neo.

After seeing the Mac Book Neo at Apple’s launch event, I was given a unit to thoroughly test. I’ve been using the laptop every day during my review, using it for a variety of day to day uses such as document creation and browsing the internet.

I also used various apps, including Garage Band, to push the Mac Book Neo, and played a bit of Cyberpunk 2077. I also linked the Mac Book Neo up to an i Pad Pro and my Mac Studio to test out how the Mac Book integrates with other Apple products.

I’ve reviewed almost every modern Mac Book during my time at Tech Radar, as well as other Macs and i Pads, plus plenty of Chromebooks and Windows 11 laptops as well, and have used this experience to help me judge whether or not the Mac Book Neo is worth buying.

Matt is Tech Radar's Managing Editor for Core Tech, looking after computing and mobile technology. Having written for a number of publications such as PC Plus, PC Format, T3 and Linux Format, there's no aspect of technology that Matt isn't passionate about, especially computing and PC gaming. He’s personally reviewed and used most of the laptops in our best laptops guide - and since joining Tech Radar in 2014, he's reviewed over 250 laptops and computing accessories personally.

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Key Takeaways

Apple Mac Book Neo: the best budget laptop you can buy
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
The Mac Book Neo is the best budget laptop you can buy right now
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you're buying the best
The Mac Book Neo is one of the most interesting releases from Apple in a long time, and it comes at an important moment