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A Week on the MacBook Neo: The Real Tradeoffs of Apple's Entry-Level Laptop
When a CNET writer's MacBook Pro went to the shop, the entry level MacBook Neo had to cover the same work, and a week long hands on surfaces exactly what that costs.
When a CNET writer's MacBook Pro went to the shop, the entry level MacBook Neo had to cover the same work, and a week long hands on surfaces exactly what that costs.
A CNET writer's 14-inch MacBook Pro went in for repair. For a week, Apple's entry-level MacBook Neo had to cover the same workload. The resulting hands-on account, published in CNET's writeup by Aryan Surendranath, reads less like a product diary than a forced-substitution test, and it leaves a reader with a sharper question than "is the Neo good enough": what does Apple's cheapest current laptop actually cost you when it has to be your only machine for real work?
The trigger was unromantic. The writer's 2022 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro developed a USB-C port issue after water damage and went to the Genius Bar. The Neo, Apple's current entry-level Mac starting at $499 per Apple's product page, stepped in with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display where the Pro has a 14.1-inch mini-LED panel, and with 8GB of RAM against the Pro's 16GB. The tested Neo configuration had 512GB of storage; CNET notes that the 256GB variant reportedly drops Touch ID, a small but telling detail about where Apple is willing to cut (CNET).
Three tradeoffs defined the week. The first is the screen: smaller, LCD, and ringed by bezels that the writer describes as "sizable," which matters most when editing video or working in bright rooms. The second is memory: 8GB of RAM is the ceiling on the tested configuration, and the writer reports a single beach-ball moment while importing roughly 50 4K iPhone clips into Premiere Pro with 20 to 25 browser tabs open and effects applied. Otherwise the week passed without slowdowns or crashes, but that single stall is the kind of edge that doesn't show up in a one-afternoon hands-on. The third is ports: three ports in total — USB 3 USB-C, USB 2 USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack — with no MagSafe, no HDMI, and no SD card slot. Apple notes on its support page that external display support varies by Mac model; the Neo's single-external-display ceiling is noted in the CNET account.
The Neo also lacks backlit keys, a long-standing complaint at the base tier. The keyboard itself is described as flagship-grade in feel. Time Machine restored the Pro setup onto the Neo in a single pass, and the macOS experience was indistinguishable from the Pro. Charging came with tradeoffs of its own: the included 20W Apple adapter takes about 2.5 hours to full, while a 45W charger cuts that to roughly 1.5 hours. Battery life is shorter than both the MacBook Air and the Pro, but it survived a coffee-shop block of writing plus a short video edit and export (CNET).
The use case matters as much as the hardware. The CNET writer is a freelance writer and short-form vlog editor for Instagram and YouTube, and the Neo handled that workload. The plan is to hand the Neo to a partner moving from Windows to macOS for Illustrator and Photoshop work, which is a different stress test entirely. Apple has not been cited for a base price beyond the $499 starting price on its product page; the Neo is described in the piece only as "a fraction" of the $1,700 M1 Pro the writer bought in 2022. Anyone reading this as a buyer's guide should treat the tradeoffs as the spine of the decision, not the price.
Two questions are worth asking before treating the Neo as either a backup or a primary machine. First, how much of the week depends on more than one external display, fast charging, or a backlit keyboard in low light? Second, how much of the work pushes past 8GB of RAM at once, even briefly, and how costly is a single beach-ball moment during that push? CNET's piece frames the Neo as a real, shipping entry point into macOS at $499, and the answer for any given reader depends on which of those tradeoffs they can absorb and which they can't.