MacBook Neo Malaysia review: Laptop of the year
The MacBook Neo is the laptop of the year, just get it, trust me.
Oh, you’re still here. Okay fine I guess we’ll explain why.
Apple surprised everyone who wasn’t paying attention when they launched the MacBook Neo last month. This is one of their cheapest laptops in a long time, and for us in Malaysia it’s even cheaper than the iPhone 17e. But when you go beyond ‘ooo shiny MacBook for cheap‘, taking a look at the spec sheet and you’ll start noticing some cause for concern. Mobile chip? Only 8GB of RAM? No backlit keyboard?
Well, having been on the MacBook Neo for a couple of weeks now, here’s why we think it’s an early frontrunner for laptop of the year.
Impressive build quality
If there’s one thing that Apple does right, it’s build quality. The all aluminum unibody is one of the best at this price range, surpassing the usual plastic or plastic base with metal lid chassis laptops that you’ll find in the sub-RM2,500 laptop market. For most people unfamiliar with Apple or tech, you can probably even fool them into thinking that it’s the MacBook Air.
Of course, you probably won’t be able to fool them if you, like us, took the signature Citrus colourway. It’s… divisive to say the least; just about everyone who’s seen my Neo either loves it or hates it. I actually quite like the Citrus colour, giving my life a nice pop of colour amidst a wardrobe of dark clothes and a desk of black and grey accessories.
The Blush pink colourway is another fun colour option for the Neo, and I can definitely appreciate Apple giving its most accessible laptop a decent range of colour options; there’s still Silver and Indigo (which is more like a dark blue) for the more boring folks out there. With Apple usually leading industry trends—just take a look at how many orange smartphones there are now—hopefully this means more laptops will soon come in more fun colour options too.
You can really feel the Neo’s build quality when you’re working away on it. The keyboard is brilliant to type on with little deck flex, and the touchpad, while unfortunately not the Force Touch trackpad, is still nice to use and responsive to touch. Speaking of touch, we took the model with Touch ID, and I think you should too honestly, as it means never having to type in your password to unlock your laptop or when Apple needs to prove it’s you. It’s also perfectly portable at just 1.23kg, and will slot into any bag that already fits the 13-inch MacBook Air.
It’s not all perfect; Cupertino definitely cut some corners on the build to meet the RM2,499 starting price on the MacBook Neo. Other than the aforementioned lack of Force Touch trackpad, the Magic Keyboard also isn’t backlit, meaning that in the dark you might find it hard to see your keys. But again, in this price range, I’ve never once had a laptop feel this sturdy and solid, and it really just feels like a much more premium laptop.
The little mobile chip that could
It’s the performance though that I had the most concerns about going into this review. The MacBook Neo comes with the Apple A18 Pro system-on-chip, which comes with two performance cores and four efficiency cores for a combined six CPU cores. The 3nm chipset also has five GPU cores and a 16-core Neural Engine, as well as 8GB of unified memory and up to a 512GB SSD.
The A18 Pro was first seen on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, but those had the full 6-core GPU in them. Instead, the MacBook Neo is basically using the binned chips that didn’t quite make the cut for the iPhone 16 Pro, with Apple salvaging those for the Neo.
We’ve seen Apple do this before many times of course, such as the original M1 MacBook Air that had one less GPU core in the base model, widening the pool of usable chips per wafer. Even the iPhone Air’s A19 Pro has one less GPU core compared to the iPhone 17 Pro.
With a gimped mobile chip and only 8GB of memory, I think it’s fair that a lot of us thought that the Neo was doomed from the start. But honestly, after weeks of use now I actually haven’t hit any stumbling blocks. Before switching back to Windows for the last couple of years, I actually daily driven an M2 MacBook Air before that, and the MacBook Neo basically felt nearly identical to that M2 laptop.
That’s perhaps not too surprising when we take a look at its synthetic benchmarks. In Cinebench 2026, the MacBook Neo and its A18 Pro scored 470 points in single thread benchmarks, which is only 3 points less than the average Apple M2. Considering that most day-to-day use is dictated by single thread speeds, the MacBook Neo still feels snappy and powerful enough for everyday tasks and apps like my multitude of Chrome tabs, Spotify, basic photo editing and word documents. The 8GB of memory never caused any issue either, likely due to MacOS and its aggressive memory management and less overhead bloat compared to Windows.
And while I’m not too surprised the Neo handled daily computing tasks just fine, I was a little more amused to see that this little thing managed to run some games too. It doesn’t run it as well as your RM10,000 gaming PC, but when you realise this is a fanless, ultralight laptop running a processor that Apple originally designed for a smartphone, you’ll start to realise that this is more of a technical marvel.
Cyberpunk 2077 managed to run at around 30fps at the lowest settings, while Dota 2 also did pretty averaging up to 80fps during the early phase, though big team fights will drop it down to almost 30fps at times. Valheim also ran at 60fps with occasional dips to 30fps, though this was in the early stages; late game performance will likely be a little worse. You’re still probably better off checking out game streaming services like GeForce Now if you want to really play games on the Neo.
As for battery life, it is just fantastic on the MacBook Neo. While it does have one of the tiniest laptop batteries I’ve ever seen with a 36.5Wh battery, I still managed to squeeze up to a day and a half of work with the Neo before I finally had to reach for a power cord. The Neo sips so little power that the included power adapter only supplies 20W charging speeds, half of the 40W charging required to fast charge an iPhone 17 Pro.
One thing I do have to nitpick though is its lack of I/O. I don’t even mind it having just two USB-C ports, I don’t even mind going back to dongle city. I’m more annoyed by the fact that only one of these USB-C ports support display output and is USB 3 compatible, while the other is a standard USB 2 port. On top of that, they don’t label or colour code which one is which either (the USB-C port nearer to you is USB 2 by the way).
Other than that though, the MacBook Neo is a great daily driver. The 13-inch Liquid Retina display is decent and gets bright enough for outdoor use, and while there’s no P3 colour coverage you still get sRGB colour here, making it great for watching movies and YouTube or even some light photo editing on the side. The side-firing speakers also sound good, albeit a little tinny at max volume.
For the price, what else can you ask for?
I keep going back to the MacBook Neo and its price tag, because honestly this might be peak price-to-performance ratio right here. At just RM2,499—or RM2,899 for more storage and Touch ID—the MacBook Neo simply stands out as the best option under RM3,000.
Competition? There’s almost none from the Windows side of things that offer such a complete package; without naming names, we found a RM2,999 laptop powered by a Snapdragon X chip. Sure, it has more memory but that Snapdragon X has less single threaded performance, not to mention a plastic chassis and lower resolution display compared to the Neo. Then there’s the matter of battery life, with Windows laptops that have a similar battery life typically priced much, much more.
All of that is to say that, if you’re a college student who isn’t a PC gamer, the Neo is hands down the laptop to get right now. Even everyday folk just looking for something to get their word documents and excel sheets filled out will be able to appreciate the MacBook Neo.
Perhaps this is Tim Cook’s one more thing, giving users an incredible laptop at an incredible price, while getting Apple a bigger slice of the budget laptop pie just before heading out the door.
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