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The MacBook Neo uses an iPhone chip, and it's just good enough

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The MacBook Neo uses an iPhone chip, and it's just good enough

A smartphone chip in a laptop sounds like a mess, but it results in a solid laptop for the money.

In retrospect, the MacBook Neo was Apple getting ahead of the curve. With tariffs and soaring memory prices in effect, the company must have known there was only so long it could keep the cost of its previous entry-level laptop — the MacBook Air — at a reasonable level. Sure enough, just three months later, the Air shot up by $200 to a new baseline of $1,300. Even at its current $700 price tag, the Neo is a comparative bargain.

Of course, the Neo achieves these savings by making compromises. The biggest by far is the use of a reproposed iPhone processor instead of an M-series chip like those found in other modern Macs, as well as the iPad Air and iPad Pro. Until the Neo launched, I had serious doubts about how well a phone chip could handle a desktop-level operating system.

The good news is that it handles macOS far better than you might think. There are some notable limitations, but these are mostly to be expected. The real question is whether you should wait for the anticipated refresh, which could be a big deal if it's not priced out of the budget sphere.

The Neo is equipped with an A18 Pro, a processor originally designed for 2024's iPhone 16 Pro. In fact, it's scaled down slightly in this case. Whereas the 16 Pro's chip had a six-core CPU paired with a six-core GPU, the Neo drops to five GPU cores.


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