I’m a MacBook Pro loyalist, but how much work can I actually do on a cheap MacBook Neo? The answer shocked me (and saved me a lot of money)

My go-to daily driver has always been a MacBook Pro — picking it to partly fulfill my diverse workload of general productivity and prosumer work, and partly to satisfy my inner speeds and feeds demon. There’s just something about seeing big numbers that feels nice, y’know.

However, the MacBook Neo is here at a third of the cost, and while I’d love to be the guy who can continue to afford expensive laptops, I’ve got a home to pay for with my wife. So how much of my day-to-day could I actually do on a Neo vs the Pro?

Because you already know this is a mismatch: a mobile chip vs full-blown laptop silicon. A $1,700 laptop vs a $600 notebook. But this test taught me two things:

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• You can actually do a lot more of a content creator workload on a MacBook Neo than you think.
• I (and probably many other Pro users) may need to re-evaluate just how much horsepower I actually need.

Let me explain.

The usability

I never thought a premium aluminum construction was possible in the cheaper laptop space, but here goes Apple proving the entire industry wrong — to the point that I’ve heard from my sources about some companies panicking hard and responding at Computex in a big way.

Of course, there’s the lack of a TouchID, which can be a pain if you use Apple Pay a whole lot, but typing in passwords isn’t the end of the world. Oh, and the lack of a backlit keyboard did make it a bit of a pain to find my bearings in the night — won’t be a problem for touch typists, but for clumsy typers who need to look down like me, you can lose your way.

For most of you, your real noticeable differences here are going to come in the touchpad, the display and sound. While your pointer gets the full Haptic Touchpad treatment on the MacBook Pro, the Neo gets a cheaper diving board (physically pressing in with each click).

It’s an ergonomic difference that you can feel a little bit in the tactility of the click, but not one that’s so problematic as to be bad. The Neo touchpad still feels good to use.

Then there’s the display and audio, which the MacBook Pro basically dominates in (especially if you go for that nano texture display). It’s a very unfair fight, though, given the Pro easily has the best speakers in the whole laptop space, but points to the Neo for having a decently colorful panel and crispy speakers (even though they’re placed almost awkwardly convenient to be covered by your fingers.

The day-to-day

So we can go off all the benchmark comparisons and spoiler alert: the M5 MacBook Pro just completely annihilates the Neo. But we’re not too fussed about these for this test. Here are the numbers for reference:

What I actually care about is the real-world multitasking chops on offer here — with twice the system memory of the MacBook Neo, the Pro does of course run away here, but is the relentless optimization of macOS’ memory usage and hot swapping of storage to create an additional layer of RAM enough to contend?

Well, I packed it full of tabs, multitasked relentlessly, and at up to 40 Chrome tabs, I felt no hitching whatsoever on the Neo’s 8GB of memory. It was only when having a ton of Chrome tabs, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Music and my favorite Sudoku game open did I then start to see some hitches and slow down — never a day-to-day productivity situation I find myself in.

Then of course, there’s the battery life. Would I have loved a bigger cell in the MacBook Neo? Absolutely! I feel with a phone chip and a 50-70Wh battery in there over a 36Wh, this device could last days of consistent use. But with the smaller cell and weaker internals, it’s still a stamina champ.

Obviously, it’s nice to have that extra performance of a MacBook Pro for more advanced tasks (more on those in a second), but if you’re just looking for an office-level workhorse with entertainment credentials, the Neo is more than enough.

The stretch goals

Now we get into the bonkers goals — things that I’d never expect a MacBook Neo to do and solely rely on a Pro for the job. I’m talking the prosumer side of things like 4K video edits, RAW photo tweaks and other jobs that really thrive with a stronger CPU and GPU than you’d find in an iPhone chip.

And I gotta be honest, I’m a little shocked at just how much I could do. Definitely at a slower pace with some thermal throttling issues, but still doable at acceptable speeds.

First off, I opened up one of my chunkier 4K projects in Final Cut Pro. I have a giant project file so it’s ran from a portable SSD, which means not only is it a test of the chipset and internal load speeds, it’s also a test of the port connectivity speed.

Of course, there’s no real competition here in terms of Thunderbolt being much faster than the USB 3 socket. But full credit to Apple’s software optimization here that I could jump all over my massive timeline on the MacBook Neo without any hitches or frame skips.

The full export takes about 50% longer on the Neo, which seemed to be in line with a lot of what I saw on RAW edit loads on Pixelmator Pro too. Put simply, if you rely on quick edit turnarounds, the Pro will pay for itself over time, but if you are a hobbyist getting into content creation for the first time, you’ll be surprised at how much a Neo gives you.

Bottom line

I won’t deny that the $1,699 M5 MacBook Pro is a mighty machine, but the point I wanted to make with this comparison is to ask one simple question: how many of you actually need that super high ceiling on performance? Spoiler alert: not a whole lot of you.

The speed and capability of that M5 chip has gotten so bonkers that its entering a prosumer tier that would be overkill for any casual enthusiast, and of course I applaud Apple for that. It’s on a level that Windows laptops could only dream of being on after all!

But when it comes to picking the right MacBook for you, the Neo just became a must-buy for roughly 75% of you reading this right now — with 15% needing the additional boost of the M5 MacBook Air, and the remaining 10% requiring the thermal management and raw horsepower of a MacBook Pro.

Seriously, it’s that zippy on all your daily tasks, and at a third the cost, it’s a dangerous proposition for budget Windows laptops and Chromebooks.

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