MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: There’s a clear (and colorful) winner

The MacBook Neo is here, and it's a colorful $599 marvel of affordability. When you think about the premium nature of the best MacBooks, this feels like a very un-Appley thing to do. But I think there are two reasons why the Cupertino crew are reportedly attacking this zone hard:

• Education: Chromebooks dominate schools, and they mean new generations are locked in with Google accounts from a young age. That’s a huge potential market of long-term future buyers for Apple to hit.
• Aim at refurbished: Apple keeps making new MacBooks, but to stem the high prices, people are looking to older and refurbished systems. As of early 2026, the M1 MacBook Air is the most purchased.

And it’s that second one that I’m most curious about. Normally selling for between $500-$600. It is clear based on the starting price of the Neo that Apple has its sights set squarely on this. But how do these two compare?

Well, we already have a pretty good idea. Not just because we've gone hands-on early with the Neo, but we’ve tested both chips in the past. Of course, this can be a bit like comparing apples and oranges — M1 is in a laptop shell with a higher level of power going to it, whereas the A18 Pro is running at a lower wattage crammed inside a phone.

But what I can do is give you an early indication based on what you can expect. Let’s get into it.

Apple 13" MacBook Neo: $599 at Apple

The MacBook Neo is Apple's most affordable Mac. The $599 laptop sports a 13-inch Liquid Retina (2408 x 1506) display, A18 Pro chipset, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and 1080p FaceTime HD camera. There's also the option to add TouchID and a 512GB SSD for a total price of $699. The 2.7-lb. laptop is available in Indigo, Blush, Citrus, and Silver.

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MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: Specs

MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: Fresh looks

Apple's having fun again with color and I love it! The MacBook Neo seems to have channelled a bit of the iBook aesthetic with four new shades: Blush (pink), Indigo (deep blue), Citrus (yellow), and Silver.

Beyond this, you can see design-wise that it takes inspiration from the flatter, more utilitarian stylings of the M5 MacBook Air. All of this is making the M1 Air feel very old.

Even the keyboard keys are color matched to the shell, but one disadvantage to the Neo here is the lack of a backlit keyboard. The M1 Air does have keys that light up, which is always more ideal for those who aren't lucky enough to be good touch typers (me).

But the design differences run into the technology itself too. Side firing speakers give you Dolby surround sound, which is significant for binge watchers. And there's a Liquid Retina display up top too — sure to be a whole lot brighter than the LED-backlit IPS panel in the Air.

MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: Performance

Apple claims this is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with Intel Core Ultra 5, but how does it stack up to M1? We can actually draw some early indications from the tests we've done of both Apple's earlier chip and the A18 Pro you'll find in the Neo.

Given when we benchmarked the M1 MacBook Air, this was back in Geekbench 5 times (and we've moved a whole generation forward), I got these numbers from the Geekbench browser for a more realistic comparison.

Built on a much more recent architecture, Apple really stepped up its game in terms of single-core snappiness in the 3nm process era.

The A18 Pro absolutely trounces the M1 Air in this area, and the end result would be that for your general daily tasks, things feel more fluid — the times an app bounces in your dock would be far shorter than it was back in 2020.

However, under heavy sustained loads of multi-core tasks (video edit rendering, heavy multitasking), the A18 Pro will probably struggle a bit like the M1. It’s clear that the MacBook Neo is not for the pros — it's for the rest of us (...yes I know the chip is literally called “pro”).

On balance, though, it’s clear that this — before even thinking about upping the total power going to the chip in a laptop shell — is going to be more than enough for the average workload of productivity and web browsing, paired with short bursts of speed.

Oh, and shout-out to the faster memory bandwidth on A18 Pro too, which is how fast data is transferred between the chip and the RAM. This will also ensure zippiness in your tasks and offset some of that multitasking pressure.

MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: Better graphics

Does the A18 Pro have a smaller GPU than the M1? Yes. Does that matter? Absolutely not. GPU tech has evolved rapidly in Apple silicon, and that is shown clearly as you take a look at how the 6 cores of the iPhone chip fare against the 8 cores of the old MacBook Air.

Since we don't have apples-to-apples Wild Life benchmarks, 3DMark has done the heavy-lifting here.

On top of that, you’ve got hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Not to say that’s going to make this cheaper MacBook a gaming beast, but for casual play on Apple Arcade or any GPU-intensive tasks, you should see M1 really fall behind here.

MacBook Neo vs MacBook Air M1: Battery life

A18 Pro was designed as a phone chip, so power efficiency was probably the main focus in the architectural design. Here’s how our battery rundown tests fared between the iPhone 16 Pro sporting this chip and the M1 MacBook Air.

Now this isn’t a fair fight — it’s a phone vs a laptop. Apple claims the MacBook Neo has up to 16 hours of battery life, which seems more realistic to the idea of putting that phone chip inside a laptop shell with a bigger battery... That's hype.

Outlook

Apple has just crashed the value laptop party, and it's having fun doing so with the gorgeous MacBook Neo. I seriously can't get over the colors, and at $599? This is potentially primed to be one of the best bang-for-your-buck laptops you can get in 2026.

And performance-wise, if these indicators are anywhere close to what we get, it's going to be just right for the vast majority of you reading this — maximum price-to-performance for those who just need a notebook to get the essentials done, binge watch and play a couple games.

The M1 MacBook Air has served us well. So well, in fact, that it continues to be the top-selling refurbished Apple laptop. But in Cupertino’s eyes, it’s long past time that this machine is put out to pasture, and it's going to be hard to say "no" to Neo.

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