Apple's $500 MacBook Neo is FASTER than you think

Hello, MacBook Neo. Yes, Apple's budget $600 MacBook is finally here. The one that you can actually get for 500 bucks with the education discount. It is a gamecher, probably destroying the budget Windows and Chromebook laptop market. But there's a problem. A lot of people are saying that this MacBook is very slow because yes, it comes with an iPhone chip, the A18 Pro. So, what we're going to do in this video is find out, is the MacBook Neo faster and more capable than you think. This is the most rounded corner MacBook I [music] have ever felt. It's almost sort of bubbly. The first thing I'm going to do is actually take off the lid [music] and see what's inside. All right, lid is off. And wa! Look at this, guys. Are these massive speakers? So, Apple said they put stereo speakers, two on both sides with a really cool grill. We have the trackpad assembly here. We got two batteries. And believe it or not, the entire computer is right here. The entire motherboard, logic board, all in one little strip. That's insane. Only Apple can do this. [music] But you know what? I want to hear how these speakers sound. So, let's do a speaker test. Holy smokes, guys. This trackpad is not a force touch glass trackpad like the other ones, but oh my gosh, it feels absolutely amazing. Apple, you absolutely killed it. >> Wow, guys. I'm very surprised. The bass and mids are very, very strong. It actually sounds really, really good. Let me just take a quick listen on the M4 MacBook Air. Huh. >> [music] >> No way, guys. The new MacBook Neo has better bass. Can you guys hear that difference? [music] It sounds awesome. And here's the webcam and the microphone on the MacBook Neo. It's still 1080p, so to me, the quality looks really good with the ISP. Really good overall colors, contrast. And now, let's dig into some of the performance specs to see how, let's say, for example, the storage is. This right here is a 512 gig model. It's $100 more expensive. It comes with Touch ID, which is very convenient [music] for doing things like Apple Pay and logging in, whatever else. Ooh, that's some pretty terrible SSD speeds, guys. This speed actually reminds me of the M2 MacBook Air where Apple screwed up and got rid of one of the nan chips, which basically made the speed almost twice as slow. This has essentially the same speed. But now before I dig more into the performance and multitasking, I want to talk about this display because [music] this display is great for a budget MacBook as cheap as this. I mean 500 bucks with a student discount. We have 500 nits which is exactly the same as Apple's M5 MacBook Air. And that [music] means it's basically going to kill a lot of the budget Windows laptops. I mean, this feels super nice and bright. And I love what Apple did with everything down [music] here. I love these nice, very light pink keys. The keys feel amazing. I mean, this is the same Magic Keyboard as you get on the more expensive MacBooks. Now, to me, the biggest downside is actually the port selection because on the left side, you can see that we do not have Mac Safe 3, which I love on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. It is awesome. We just have two USBC ports. So, you got to use one of them to charge. Now, the problem is that they are not the same speed. One of them is slow with old USB 2 lightning [music] speeds. The problem is you don't know which one it is. So, let's go ahead and test it out. I got an SSD right here. So, let's plug in to this first top port and test out the speed. Here we go. We have 822 for the read and 889 for the right. That's about what this SSD [music] is capable of. So, it looks like the port near the top is [music] the fast port. All right, we're now in the second port. Look at this guys. I just got a notification. Use other port for faster connection. That is very cool that they are doing that. That way you know, oh crap, I plugged it into the wrong port. 38 for the read, 41 for the right. It's essentially unusable for any kind of storage. Now, one of the really cool decisions that Apple did is that they put the headphone jack right here towards the bottom of the MacBook Neo. And the cool thing is that if you have some headphones and because they moved it down, you get about a few extra inches of cable, so it won't kind of be snagging if you have a really short cable and it won't get in the way of your other cables. However, there is another downside and that is the battery and the charging. Right now, I have it plugged in. I'm at 69%. It says I have an hour and 22 minutes until fully charged. That's because the charging is pretty dang slow. We don't have real fast charging. Apple says it's 20 watt charging. Online, I did see somebody mention that it actually accepts up to 30 watts. But the cool thing about the charging speed being so slow is that you could actually grab a power bank, plug it in just like that. And here you can see we're now at 72%. It says an hour 22 minutes. We are now charging the MacBook Neo from a small power bank like this. This is actually from our longtime sponsor, Alumu, which they just changed the power bank industry with their M10 compact magnetic power bank. This has 10,000 milliamp hours of battery, which is essentially the same as the battery that's inside the MacBook Neo, which is perfect. It features 35 watt charging through the built-in power cable that works like a loop, so it'll fully charge this at the fastest speed. This actually saved our butts in Barcelona where we could get a quick charge on the go. And my favorite thing about it is that you can charge four devices at once, like an iPhone via Max Safe, another device with a built-in USBC cable, an Apple Watch, and another device using the USBC port. This type of functionality honestly makes this battery bank my go-to from now on for travel and everyday carry at home in the office. since their GO9 Infinite Dual Max stand works seamlessly with the M10, letting you charge your Apple Watch and iPhone at the same time in standby mode. And it also recharges quickly with 35 watt max charging, so you can throw it in the bag, take it on the go for your MacBook Neo and not be tied to the wall. This is probably my new favorite battery bank, and you can check it out using the links in the video description and pin comment below. Now, jumping right into performance, we have Geekbench 6 opened up right here. You can see in the device info, [music] we have the A18 Pro, the iPhone chip. Let's do the CPU benchmark. And here we go. Take a look at this. This is actually faster than Apple's legendary M1 MacBook Air, which a lot of people said was fast enough, but now that we have an iPhone chip, they're complaining. The cool thing though is for a lot of the people that are going to be buying this MacBook, the single core score is what matters the most for a lot of the basic apps that people run. So, for example, let me test speedometer 3.0. This is essentially a web browser benchmark that kind of tests how snappy your web browsing is going to be. There you go. 48.6, believe it or not. But this web browsing score is faster than most of the Windows laptops that we have now. Even the new Panther Lakes are not as fast as this. That's what matters for snappiness. For example, one of the tests that we usually run is web design within an app called Figma. This is a project provided to us by 500 designs, one of the best design and marketing agencies in the US. What we usually do is we'll export 12 of these layers, and see how fast it takes. There you go. It just finished a minute and 58 seconds. I just checked back and it looks like this MacBook Neo beat the score of the M1 MacBook Air. That took 2 minutes and 4 seconds. Also, the M4 MacBook Air took a minute 30, so it's not too far off. And in terms of smoothness, we can also just zoom in. Wow, that was very fast and snappy. And now, let's move over to the graphics performance. Geekbench 6. This is the Metal benchmark. It looks like we have 31,000 metal score points. That's actually faster than the M1 MacBook Air. I've got to say, that's pretty dang good for an iPhone chip. So, instead of just doing more graphics benchmarks like 3D Mark, let's skip all of that. Let's see if a game runs like League of Legends, one of my favorite games. From the looks of it, guys, I don't know if you could see, 240 FPS that we're getting on an iPhone chip, but even now with some creeps minions, we are still getting over 200. So, wow. Games like this completely fine on the A18 Pro. And now let's do Cinebench. This is the new 2026 version. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to do a single test. All right, guys. This is really weird. I'm running a MX Power Gadget. We've already started Cinebench. The ecores are now running faster than the PC cores 2.42 GHz, but the package power only 4 watts. That is absolutely insane. It is sipping power and choosing to throttle the performance right now. Looking at the temps, we're looking at around 36° C right there at the hottest point. That is actually significantly cooler than the M4 MacBook Air, which we tested was 44° at the hottest point. They're both fanless, so this is definitely throttling the clock speeds down just to save power. And we do have a score. We have a,349 points. And just for comparison, the Panther Lake Asus Expert Book Ultra that got 3,440. The M5 MacBook Pro got 4,62. So yeah, this is definitely a lot slower. And now let's test something that's actually realistic, a workflow that people do, which is photo editing. This is in Lightroom Classic. One thing we usually do is we kind of just list through them, see if it's nice and snappy. And looking at it, it's loading these photos pretty quickly. do some exposure adjustments, contrast, basically good enough for Lightroom Classic. Perfectly snappy. Let's go ahead and do an export test. I can open up the preferences here. You can see that we have full graphics acceleration enabled, which is good. We know that we have ray tracing built into [music] the GPU cores. So, let's go ahead and export. Looking at the clock speeds here, I saw the GPU go up to about 5.7 GHz clock speed, but it's happening in bursts where it's switching between the GPU and the single core, which you could see bursts almost as high as 4 GHz for the performance cores. So, this is actually a really nice scenario where you're not maxing it out all the time every second. It's working in bursts like a lot of different apps and tasks do, which make it pretty dang quick. All right, we just finished. 2 minutes 42 seconds to export those 50 photos. That is actually, let's see, ah, just a little bit slower than the M1 Air. That took 2 minutes 32. So, [music] definitely not quite as good, but it's just right there. You can see that the M4 MacBook Air is under a minute because they have obviously faster cores, more of them. But based on what I'm seeing here, this is just good enough for photo editing, like some small projects here and there. It'll definitely pass at being fast enough, especially with it being nice and snappy to make all your adjustments. So, not bad. It can do photo editing. And now, let's see if the budget MacBook Neo can also do some highquality 4K video editing. Right here, I have a 5-minute project with some HEVC footage. I've also applied a couple of LUTs. I added some 4K film grain and playing it back. You can see I have it set to best quality and we are getting full 24 fps. So, it's running it completely fine. I can go over to MX Power Gadget and you can see here that the GPU is only taking 1 ghahz. So, it's not maxing out. It's not using 5 plus like it did before. The pecores, however, are at basically 4 gigahertz, but the temps are nice and low. And that's because Apple is using their encoders and decoders to essentially take care of all of this footage so that we don't have to worry about putting too much load on the CPU itself. And you can see it's running perfectly fine. And now, let's export this project to see how quick it is with these encoders. All right, now this is interesting. We're at about 37% done. It definitely feels slower than on the M4 MacBook Air, even with the encoders. And here I'm seeing multiple things. I'm seeing that we're getting about 80 85% GPU usage. So, it is relying on the GPU. It's also relying heavily on the CPU as well. We're using all the cores right here. Not as much performance cores, mostly ecores. And we can also see the memory in the activity monitor right here. We only have 8 gigs, which does seem to be limiting it right now because we are using over a gigabyte of swap memory. And bam, we just finished 3 minutes and 8 seconds to export that 5inut clip. So I just pulled up what we got on the M1 and the M4. The M4 finishes in just 2 minutes. So essentially 2/3 of the time of what we just got on the MacBook Neo. The M1 finished in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. So, it is slower than the M1, but surprisingly not that far off, especially with only 8 gigs of RAM and an iPhone chip. I'd say that's pretty impressive. So, from the looks of it, yes, you can do 4K video editing just fine on the MacBook Neo thanks to those encoders and decoders that take care of everything. So, with all that said and tested, is the new $500 MacBook Neo faster than we all expected? Well, I've got to say yes. We did things that Apple is not marketing people to do. You could do some 4K video editing. You could do photo editing, nice and snappy, web design. The web browsing is faster than Panther Lake. I mean, this is incredibly capable for that price. And it's shocking that this thing is such a good deal, such a low price, and Windows laptops, you guys got to look out because if this thing can handle basically all of the needs that essentially what 90% of regular users will be doing, why would they spend more money on a crappier, cheaper, plastic Windows laptop with a worse display with lower brightness and lower build quality, lower reliability, lower resale real value. I mean, this thing is going to shake the entire PC industry. And it's crazy that we just did all of that on this cheap MacBook Neo. Let's start doing some comparisons to some other Macs, like let's say the legendary M1 MacBook Air. If you want to see that, subscribe above cuz that's coming very soon. Definitely check out one of those two videos right there. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next

Buy MacBook Neo on Amazon ➡ https://geni.us/qlyh Buy the AULUMU M10 Portable Battery Bank on Amazon ➡ https://amzn.to/4cpAWOT Buy AULUMU M10 on the official site ➡ https://bit.ly/4rfMwzM Apple's MacBook Neo is FINALLY Here.. and it's FASTER than you think! We tested EVERYTHING to prove it! Timestamps ⬇️ MacBook Neo TESTED - 00:00 Blush Pink Design - 0:12 Teardown & Internals - 0:45 Speaker Test - 1:10 Webcam & Mics - 1:57 SSD Speed Test - 2:08 Display Details - 2:42 USB-C Port Limitations - 3:20 Headphone Jack Upgrade - 4:29 Battery & Charging Speed - 4:50 Power Bank Charging - 5:21 Geekbench 6 CPU Test - 6:43 Speedometer 3.1 - 7:15 Figma Web Design - 7:39 Geekbench 6 GPU Metal - 8:18 League of Legends Gaming - 8:36 Cinebench CPU Rendering - 9:05 Photo Editing Performance - 10:13 4K Video Editing - 12:02 Faster than YOU think - 14:29 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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. -~-~~-~~~-~~-~-