Mac Book Neo comes under fire in AMD's latest marketing campaign — but it's a poorly thought-out attack | Tech Radar

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Mac Book Neo comes under fire in AMD's latest marketing campaign — but it's a poorly thought-out attack

AMD fires flak at Mac Book Neo as a poor choice… for a gaming laptop of all things

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AMD has a new marketing campaign criticizing the Mac Book Neo

The main thrust of the argument is that the Neo fails as a gaming laptop

That's a highly confusing angle to take, seeing as this isn't what Mac Books are about – and especially not the budget-friendly Neo

AMD appears to be getting defensive about its Windows 11 laptops and the threat posed by Apple's Mac Book Neo.

Tom's Hardware noticed that AMD has a new marketing campaign that intends to take the Neo down a notch or two, promoting the benefits of Ryzen AI CPUs instead.

AMD insists that: "The competition made compromises. You don't have to." It then adds that: "Everything Mac Book Neo leaves out, built in with AMD Ryzen AI processors."

The main thrust of the compromise messaging is that the Mac Book Neo isn't up to scratch for gaming. AMD notes that 15 of the top 20 PC games don't run natively on a Mac Book Neo, and that you need 'workarounds' (emulation) to play them. The games are picked by Team Red itself, although it's a fair enough selection of esports classics and more modern efforts such as Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Black Ops 7.

It's not just about games, of course, but that's the lead item here. AMD also points out that Windows 11 laptops with its Ryzen AI CPUs can have touchscreens (which the Mac Book Neo doesn't), and a better port selection than the Mac Book Neo's two USB-C connectors.

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AMD then highlights benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 220 against Apple's A18 processor as seen in the Neo, where both laptops have 8GB of RAM, but the Ryzen is up to 57% faster for multitasking, and 38% faster for content creation as measured in Blender and Cinebench, among others.

This is an odd one, really, because what plenty of confused people on Reddit have been saying – echoing my own first thought – is: "I didn't buy a Mac to play games. That's not really what they're for."

Someone else on that thread agrees: "Ok, but no one is buying a Mac Book for gaming, right?"

And a further Redditor observes: "Imagine if 'Macs don't game' is the best you've got, lol. I'd fire my marketing team."

These folks are, of course, quite right. You don't buy a Mac Book for gaming, and moreover, you especially don't buy a Mac Book Neo for PC games. This isn't just an Apple laptop, but a low-end one with a mobile chip designed entirely around being affordable (for students, mainly) and able to cope with daily computing workloads – and that's all.

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Okay, so you might want to do a spot of casual gaming, but the Mac Book Neo can cope with that just fine. What you aren't going to be looking to do on a Neo is play the top PC games, not unless you're very misguided, and okay, probably a few people out there do fall into this category.

So why AMD has led with this gaming angle in its Ryzen AI laptop marketing, versus Mac Book Neo marketing, really is a head-scratcher. It isn't like the kind of Windows 11 laptops AMD is using as comparisons to the Neo, in a similar price bracket, can run those top PC games all that well, anyway.

Of course, AMD has chosen its 'top games' very carefully, which goes without saying. But still, the Radeon 760M integrated graphics (used in the comparative benchmarking) can't come close to running some of these games with any kind of fluidity, even with low details (at the Full HD resolution in which the testing was conducted).

The same cherry-picking applies to the productivity and creativity benchmarks, and the thing about the Mac Book Neo is that, as we've seen at Tech Radar, despite only having 8GB of RAM, it runs smoothly and responsively in everyday tasks. That's not something you can always say about a Windows 11 laptop with 8GB of RAM in the same price bracket.

Granted, Microsoft is busy working on making Windows 11 better with lower RAM loadouts, but Apple isn't standing still either, providing quite a performance boost with the recently launched beta of mac OS 27.

AMD should've thought more about the positioning of this marketing piece, especially seeing as it's the Neo the company is going after. The truth is that, as far as gaming is concerned, you shouldn't expect much out of any budget-friendly laptop – even if what you get from a Windows 11 machine is obviously a better deal, thanks to the mentioned game compatibility with no need for emulation tricks.

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➡️ Read our full guide to the best laptops

Best overall: Apple Mac Book Air 13-inch M5
Best budget: Apple Mac Book Neo
Best Windows 11 laptop Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch
Best thin and light: Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i
Best Ultrabook Asus Zenbook S 16

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for Tech Radar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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