MacBook Neo vs $600 Laptops - BIG Disappointment!

MacBook Neo with 8 gigs of RAM versus 16 gigs on three budget Windows laptops. Can Apple's A18 Pro iPhone chip compete with the best new value chips from AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon? Here you can see all these specs on screen. They all have 512 gigs of storage. And they're all priced between $5 to $700, 600 on the Mac with the education discount. And yes, I purchased all of these myself last Friday on Amazon. So, this is not sponsored in any way. We're going to see how the MacBook Neo competes. Now, if it looks like the MacBook Neo is a lot brighter from that top cam, that's because it is. It has 500 nits of standard brightness compared to 300 nits on all of these Windows laptops. But looking from the front, the difference isn't as big as what you're seeing in the top cam. And that's because the viewing angles are atrocious on these displays. And in general, just watching HDR video, they look terrible in terms of the colors. While the Neo looks very nice and bright, the colors really pop and look great with deep blacks. So, let's jump right into the full comparison. We're going to be testing performance, speakers, webcams, design, everything. And we're also testing the battery life. So, I'm going to go ahead and unplug each of these laptops. They're all charged up to 100%. And yes, this is going to be a little bit biased against the MacBook Neo because I'm going to run it at the full 500 nits of brightness for this full test. Now, first things first, we have the designs. And these Windows laptops have something special, and that is stickers. If you love stickers, these Windows laptops are for you because you don't get it on the MacBook Neo. With the Neo, you get a full aluminum enclosure, top, bottom, everything. very nice and solid, barely any flex on the keyboard versus these Windows laptops. They all are made of basically just fully plastic. The trackpads are also quite terrible. They all have diving board designs where they're connected at the top, making it very hard to press, and then very easy towards the bottom. While the MacBook Neo has a really nice glass trackpad which is perfectly as easy to click all the way around. Even though it's not force touch, it does feel amazing. And then as for the display designs, I mean, this Acer display is absolutely atrocious. We have these huge thick plastic bezels that remind me of, I don't know, 2008 Apple's MacBook Air. I mean, that at least had aluminum. This is plastic. It is atrocious. Next step up, you have a little bit darker, still plastic, terrible bezels on this one. And then the Dell at least, you have nice glass with black bezels. Looks a lot more clean. The MacBook Neo, I'd say, is the best. Really deep blacks on the bezel, rounded corners, looks awesome with that nice brightness. Of course, these are all 14-in displays, while the Neo is a 13-in. So, you could see it's quite a bit smaller. But in terms of the footprint and the design, it is so much more compact, so much more portable, and very, very thin compared to all of these that are honestly pretty chunky. And the MacBook Neo does have these cool little sidefiring speaker enclosures. So, let's go ahead and do a speaker comparison with all of these. World of silver. No more heartb breaks, tears, painkillers. Take me somewhere unfamiliar. Bring me back to where we started off. Get me out of now where we started. Get me out of now where we started. >> You guys let me know what you thought down in the comments section below. But to me, the MacBook Neo has the best speakers. It has the best bass and the best separation of frequencies. You can hear all of them very nicely. And now that I'm on this really dark display, this Dell is really bothering me with its reflectivity. It's just so reflective compared to the Neo. These two are not bad because they have matte screens. Now, jumping into the webcam and mic comparison. This is the 1080p webcam on the Dell. Let me know how the microphones sound down below. And now we have the webcam on the Acer. This one actually looks pretty dang clean in terms of the quality and the lack of noise. And now we have the 1080p webcam on the MacBook Neo. To me, it does look a little bit more clean. Not as much noise around the background. And here we are on the ASUS finishing it off. I don't know if it's just the display being dim, but this camera looks quite a bit dim. Let me know guys what you think down in the comments. Now, the area where the MacBook Neo truly loses is the ports because you only get a headphone jack and two USBC ports with one of those having USB 2 super slow speeds compared to the rest of the Windows laptops. They all have HDMI. They all have multiple Thunderbolt ports and USBA ports that are all faster than on the MacBook Neo. And now, let's get into the performance testing. The first thing is the SSD speed. I'm going to go ahead and run Crystal Disc Mark. Like I mentioned before, they all have 512 gig SSDs. And dang, this is the biggest drawback for the MacBook Neo. Only 1,700 read while you get two to four times faster read speed on the other Windows laptops. And in terms of the right 1,700 for the Neo, basically double on the rest with the Asus having the best SSD. Great job on that value. This is actually a big downside for the Neo because it only has 8 gigs of RAM. So, it uses the SSD for swap memory. So, this is pretty terrible. And now, let's get into Geekbench 6 CPU testing. Right here, this ASUS has the Intel Lunar Lake 226V with 16 gigs of RAM. Then the Asus has the Qualcomm Snapdragon X with 16 gigs. And then the Dell has the AMD Ryzen AI5340, but for some reason Geekbench is showing 8 gigs of RAM, which is weird because I opened up the resource monitor task manager. You can see 16 gigs right here, but for some reason it only shows total 8 gigs. And then the system information kind of says the same thing. So I have no idea what's going on. Everything's updated fully, but let's go ahead and run the CPU benchmark. And here we have the scores. And you can see that the MacBook Neo has the highest single core performance, 3500. That's between 40 to 70% faster than the rest of these Windows laptop chips. However, the Asus with the Snapdragon X had the fastest multi-core performance, about 17% faster than we got on the MacBook Neo. Now, I also ran these plugged in, and these two laptops did not change at all. So, they're the same performance on battery and on charger. However, the Dell did lose some performance. It actually became the slowest in terms of multi-core when you're on battery. So, how does that performance translate into the real world? Well, this is Speedometer 3.1. It is a web browser benchmark, which essentially just tests how snappy it is for web browsing. And dang, that is a huge difference. 49.7 on the MacBook Neo. That's 60% to two times faster than these Windows laptops. Look at this. Only 24.4 on this AMD chip. This thing is going to be the snappiest by far. And now let's get into web design with Figma. This is a project provided to us by 500 Designs, one of the best design and marketing agencies in the US. So, what I'm going to do is export 12 of these pages and see how long they take. And there you go. It's done. Both the AMD chip and Lunar Lake beat out the A18 Pro and the MacBook Neo, but the Snapdragon X took significantly longer. And now, let's get into graphics performance with Geekbench 6. We have the 840M on the AMD chip. We have the A18 Pro with metal. We have the 130V Lunar Lake and the X145. Let's test it. And dang, the performance of these two laptops is looking pretty atrocious for graphics. I mean, the MacBook Neo 31,000, that's over three times faster than this. At least the Lunar Lake scored pretty dang good, but still 42% faster performance on the Neo. But real quick, I want to give a shout out to our friends at Phone Arena. This is not sponsored, but they featured me in this awesome iconic phone's art book. So, you can check it out and get the limited edition with the included stickers and everything else down below. And now, let's get into gaming with Steel Nomad Light. This is a 3D Mark benchmark. And unfortunately, I have to run them separately since I have the same Steam account. So, I'll run these one by one. It finally finished. And it looks like the Lunar League chip is actually 26% faster than the Neo, which is in second place in terms of performance. The Asus Snapdragon X was the worst, less than half the performance of Lunar Lake. And then I also tested Solar Bay Extreme, which is a ray tracing benchmark. And here, Lunar Lake was actually 31% faster than the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo. And this Snapdragon X couldn't even run the test because I'm pretty sure it doesn't even have ray tracing support. It says that the graphics driver is not updated, but all the Windows updates are done. So, I'm pretty sure it just doesn't have ray tracing. And now, let's move on to video rendering in Blender. This is the party tug project. And the difference here is the AMD chip does support hip ray tracing. The A18 Pro supports metal with ray tracing. The Intel, even though it usually uses one API, apparently this Lunar Lake chip does not support it. So, the GPU compute is grayed out. So, I guess it's going to be using CPU. And same thing for the Snapdragon. It does not have any sort of ray tracing. So, it's fully grayed out on this as well. And all right, you guys are not going to believe this. The MacBook Neo finished in 2 minutes and 31 seconds, making it 2 and 1/2 to three times faster than the rest of these Windows laptops. I mean, 8 minutes 12 seconds on this Lunar Lake. That took forever. And the Snapdragon somehow this one was the best out of the Windows laptops. And now, let's get into another realworld test. This is photo editing in Lightroom Classic and the ARM version of Lightroom on the Snapdragon X. I've double checked the settings on all of them to make sure full GPU acceleration and exporting is enabled on all of them. And now I have Ben here to help me click export all at the same time. So 3 2 1 go. All righty. And they all finished. The Snapdragon was the first one. It just flew through at a minute and 5 seconds. Maybe because it's the ARM version of Lightroom, very well optimized. Lunar Lake was next at a minute and 48. The AMD chip with a minute and 53. And then finally, 2 minutes and 23 seconds for the MacBook Neo. That's probably because it's fanless. The chip was hot the whole time. And RAM is extremely important for Lightroom and photo exporting. And this, of course, only has 8 gigs. So, this was the loser in this test. And now, let's double up the test. I have 100. And I also want to do some multitasking. So, I'll show what I mean in just a minute. You guys let me know if you see any differences in loading of some web browser tabs. 3 2 1 go. And now, let's hover over the browser. 3 2 1 go. All right. It looks like the MacBook Neo did delay a little bit. You can see we have five tabs open. So, let's switch over to this site. 3 2 1 go. Yep, I definitely saw it faster here. MacBook Neo had some delay. Next one. 3 2 1 go. Yep. Once again, MacBook Neo with 8 gigs of RAM is behind. 3 2 1 go. Yep. Consistently. That is insane. And then the last one. 3 2 1 go. Wow, >> look at that. Yeah, that's crazy, man. >> Not good. >> All right, the test is now finished. It took only 2 minutes 35 seconds on the Snapdragon X, 3 minutes 51 on the Lunar Lake, 4 minutes 54 seconds on the AMD chip, and 5 minutes and 12 seconds on the MacBook Neo. Once again, it was slower. 8 gigs of RAM is not enough. It is a huge bottleneck because I looked at the swap memory. The 8 gigs was maxed out and it was using 4 gigs of swap. So, it is starving for memory, especially with those ultra slows speeds compared to faster SSDs on all of these Windows laptops. And as you saw in the web browser test during the run, the MacBook Neo consistently took longer to load up those pages. So, worse multitasking with that starving 8 gigs. And now, let's get into the final test. This is Cinebench 2026, and we're going to do a multi-core render. And go. You can see we're only using about 5 watts for the CPU. That's it on the A18 Pro. This is already at 106° C. Holy moly. It's already throttling. You can see the P core is now below the E core right there. It's throttling like crazy. The wattage is now down from five down to four watts. So, it cannot handle the heat with it being fanless and with there not really being a good heat sink or heat pad for that chip. Looking at the temps, we have about 36 over on the Asus Snapdragon Lunar Lake. You can see all that heat getting expelled right there. 37° right there. Moving over to the MacBook. 38°. Holy smokes. 43°. And there you go. They are all now finished. And you guys won't believe this. The Snapdragon X was the winner. 2843 points. Over two times faster than the A18 Pro and the MacBook Neo, which scored 1,400. Once again, because it was just maxed out on the temps, fanless, that is a big struggle for it. Surprisingly, the AMD was barely faster than the MacBook Neo. Lunar Lake was somewhere in the middle, also performing quite well. And now, with all of that testing out of the way, let's check on the battery life. Once again, keep in mind, we had this at 500 nits. so much brighter than the others for the entire test, which honestly drains a lot of battery. But let's start over here with the Asus. We got 35% on the battery. We got 50% on the Acer Lunar Lake. Pretty dang good. The MacBook Neo, 28% so far, the worst battery. And finally, 29% on the Dell with the AMD chip. So, the MacBook Neo was the loser, probably because of the extra brightness for basically three hours and 15 minutes. I'm sure if I had it lower, it would have performed a lot better. So, with that said, what is the conclusion? Well, as you guys saw, the MacBook Neo is definitely not meant for running a lot of performance tasks, especially with multitasking and doing things like Lightroom Classic, which really, really depends on the RAM. You guys saw the multitasking test. It was struggling. Slower snappiness compared to the others that have 16 gigs of RAM. There were a couple of areas where it was the fastest, like Blender was extremely fast thanks to the modern ray tracing cores. Of course, with speedometer 3.1, the web browsing is going to feel the snappiest, assuming that you're not running some kind of task that's eating up all of your RAM. But to be honest, I'm actually really impressed with this laptop right here in terms of performance and battery. I mean, it had 50% and the performance was pretty good balanced. In some cases, it wasn't the best where the Snapdragon X won in quite a few of those tests compared to the Lunar Lake and the AMD. But I really wish this design didn't look so cheap, especially with these crappy plastic bezels and the bad trackpad. But let's answer the original question. Can the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro iPhone chip with only 8 gigs of RAM compete with these other Windows laptops? Honestly, no. The 8 gigs of RAM is extremely limiting and the SSDs are just too slow to have reliable swap memory performance. So, it was a loser in many of these tests. It looks like we're going to have to wait for the second version of the Neo with the A19 Pro chip cuz that has 12 gigs of RAM. So, that's going to help a little bit. But if we ignore all the performance tests and just judge it based on its usability as a basic laptop for basic things like web browsing, watching content on the better display, listening to stuff on the better speakers, having the better portability, the much better design, trackpad quality, reliability, the MacBook Neo is a winner for all of those things. So, if you're someone who cares about RAM, performance, multi-core performance, those tests, the MacBook Neo isn't for you, you should consider the MacBook Air. If you're someone who just wants to do basic things and have a reliable laptop, the MacBook Neo is going to be perfect for you. But this just does not compete with the others in terms of performance tests. So, with that said, let me know your thoughts down below in which one of these laptops you would rather have on a dayto-day basis. Definitely subscribe above for more videos like this one and check out our other videos right over there. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next

Order the Iconic Phones Coffee Table Artbook (code MAXTECH) ➡ https://geni.us/iconicphones Apple MacBook Neo with A18 Pro on Amazon ($599) ➡ https://geni.us/auAQpAb ASUS Laptop with Snapdragon X on Amazon ($634) ➡ https://geni.us/BBNMR2A Dell Laptop with AMD chip on Amazon ($659) ➡ https://geni.us/IFKnddD Acer Laptop with Intel Lunar Lake on Amazon ($499) ➡ https://geni.us/keJkw Download the Swamp Blender Project by Lasha3D ➡ https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/MX7zz/swamp App we use for Temp & Fan Speed Monitoring ➡ https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/index.php?fpr=maxtech Timestamps ⬇️ 8GBMacBook Neo vs 16GB Windows Laptops - 00:00 300 vs 500 nit Battery Test - 0:35 Design Differences - 1:31 Display Comparison - 2:22 Speaker Comparison - 3:18 Webcams & Mics - 4:34 Port Differences - 5:12 SSD Speed Test - 5:37 Geekbench 6 CPU - 6:20 Speedometer 3.1 - 7:43 Figma Web Design - 8:12 Geekbench GPU - 8:35 3DMark Steel Nomad Light - 9:20 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme - 9:48 Blender 3D Rendering - 10:15 Lightroom Classic 50x Export - 11:12 Multitasking RAM Stress Test - 12:15 Lightroom Classic 100x Export - 13:14 Cinebench 2026 Multi-core - 14:08 Thermal Camera Temps - 14:50 Battery Life Results - 15:40 Where the MacBook Neo can't keep up - 16:30 Can the 8GB MacBook Neo beat 16GB? - 17:42 What the MacBook Neo is GREAT for - 18:14 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Shop on Amazon ➡ https://geni.us/wB2mWqd Shop on B&H ➡ https://bhpho.to/2kfoI34 Shop on Adorama ➡ https://bit.ly/2R7qezq 10% off unlimited yearly music licensing on Soundstripe (what I use for all my videos) use coupon code "Max" here: http://soundstripe.grsm.io/e/6lv If you enjoy our content please consider supporting us on Patreon. Even $2 a month helps us make more and better content for you! https://www.patreon.com/MaxYuryev -~-~~-~~~-~~-~- PRIVACY POLICY and FULL DISCLOSURE: °Max Tech is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com °Max Tech is a participant in the B&H Photo Video affiliate program that provides an advertising commission if you purchase through our links. °If you purchase something from our affiliate links will get a small commission with no extra cost to you. This makes it possible for us to make more videos. Thank you! °We DO NOT collect, store, use, or share any data about you. -~-~~-~~~-~~-~-