Reviewed by Marcus Knapman, BSc (Hons) Computing ·
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For about fifteen years, the cheapest way into the Mac world has felt like a bit of a trick question. You'd see the price, think 'that's not too bad', and then discover the fine print had quietly eaten your budget. So when Apple announced a 13-inch MacBook at £699.97 running an iPhone-derived A18 Pro chip, I'll admit my eyebrows did some work.
Here's my bottom line, up front. The Apple MacBook Neo is the most sensible entry-level Mac I can remember, and for students, parents and anyone whose computing life lives in a browser, email and Word, it makes a very strong case for itself. It looks the part, the screen is properly good for the money, and the 16-hour battery claim is the sort of number that makes charger-hunting in a lecture hall a thing of the past.
But it isn't a perfect piece of kit, and it isn't for everyone. That 8GB of unified memory is the elephant in the room, and I'll get to it. I haven't had this on my own desk for a month, so I'm being upfront about my method: I've worked through the spec sheet in detail and read plenty of buyer reactions to Apple's recent hardware. Take that as research-led opinion rather than a bench test. And on that basis, I think the Neo is going to sell by the lorryload.
£699.97 is the number that matters most here. For years, getting a new MacBook meant stepping well beyond what most students or families wanted to spend, and the alternative was a second-hand Air from a few generations back. The Neo changes that maths. You get a new aluminium laptop, a 512GB SSD (a decent amount of storage at this price, since plenty of budget laptops still ship with 256GB) and the full macOS experience, all for under £700.
Compared with what else sits around this price, that's a persuasive package. Plenty of Windows laptops at this money are plastic, dim of screen and short of battery. The Neo is none of those things on paper.
This is the unusual bit. Rather than one of Apple's M-series laptop chips, the Neo uses the A18 Pro, the kind of silicon you'd normally associate with a phone. Apple says it's built to handle everyday jobs: photo editing, spreadsheets, summarising notes with on-device AI, and Apple Arcade games.
I think that framing is sensible. Nobody buying a £700 laptop is rendering 4K video timelines. What they want is a machine that wakes instantly, doesn't stutter when there are fifteen browser tabs open and lasts the day. Apple's spec sheet points squarely at that kind of user, and phone-class chips have a long record of being quick and frugal with power, which fits the claimed battery life.
The caveat is that it's a different chip family from the M-series Macs, so if you've got heavy, specialist software in mind, check compatibility before you commit rather than after.
Right, the negative. Eight gigabytes of unified memory in 2025-and-beyond territory feels thin, and it's the first thing I'd flag to any prospective buyer. Apple's unified memory design is efficient, and macOS is good at managing it, but efficiency has limits. If you're the sort who keeps forty tabs open, runs a video call, has a music app going and a big document open simultaneously, you may feel the squeeze sooner than you'd like.
There's also no way to upgrade it later. What you buy is what you're stuck with for the life of the machine, so think about how you'll use it in three or four years, not just today. For light-to-moderate use I expect it to be fine. For anyone who tends to push their laptop hard, I'd be nervous.
The 13-inch Liquid Retina display runs at 2408x1506, reaches up to 500 nits and supports a billion colours. On a budget laptop, that's the sort of detail that quietly makes the whole thing feel more expensive than it is. Text should look crisp, photos vivid, and 500 nits is bright enough to be usable by a window or in a bright café.
Add the 1080p FaceTime HD camera and the dual-mic array, and the Neo looks well suited to the modern reality of video lectures and remote calls. The two side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio are a nice touch too, though as with any laptop this size, I wouldn't expect them to replace a proper speaker for music.
This one's a Silver, the safe choice, but Apple is also offering Blush, Citrus and Indigo, each with a colour-matched keyboard. It's a small thing, but it gives the Neo a personality that most budget laptops lack. If you're buying for a teenager heading off to university, I suspect the colour options will do half the persuading for you.
Touch ID is included, which is the sort of convenience you stop noticing until you use a laptop without it. Unlocking with a fingertip and authorising purchases without typing passwords is quietly one of the nicest parts of owning a modern Mac.
If you already live in Apple's ecosystem, the Neo gets noticeably more useful. iPhone Mirroring lets you view and control your phone from the Mac, you can copy on one device and paste on the other, and texts and FaceTime calls can be handled from the laptop. None of that is new to Apple fans, but it's the sort of friction-removal that makes people stay loyal.
If you're coming from Android and Windows, you won't get any of that, so the Neo's appeal is weaker. It's still a competent laptop, but you'd be paying Apple prices without tapping into the thing that makes Apple's pricing make sense.
Apple's pitch is that the chip is designed from the ground up to run AI tasks on the device itself, with privacy protections baked in. For writing help, summarising notes and general tidying up of your work, that's a handy extra. I'd treat it as a bonus rather than a reason to buy. The features will keep evolving, and the core appeal of the Neo remains a good screen, long battery life and a sensible price.
The Apple MacBook Neo is a smart, attractive and sensibly priced laptop for students, families and everyday users who live in browsers, documents and video calls. If you multitask heavily or run demanding software, spend more on a machine with extra memory; if you're after a stylish, long-lasting Mac that won't wreck the budget, this is the one I'd point you towards.
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