Our first hands-on look at Apple’s MacBook Neo

Here is the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new entry-level Mac laptop. Its colorful chassis options easily set it apart from current MacBook Air and Pro models. But the biggest difference is that inside the Neo is an A18 Pro iPhone chip instead of an M-series processor Apple typically uses in its laptops and recent desktops.

The first thing you notice, touching the device, is obviously the colors. They’re not quite as vibrant as the orange iPhone 17 Pro, but the blush and citrus colors (which are more like pink-ish and chartreuse-ish) do look pretty nice. Apple says the keyboards are color-matched, but the effect is pretty subtle on all but the blue — which is called indigo.

The Neo is the same weight as the latest MacBook Air, but it carries the weight differently. It feels denser in its slightly smaller footprint, more like a slab of metal somehow. In a short test, the keyboard (which isn’t backlit) felt like an Air keyboard, but the trackpad felt very different. It isn’t haptic like other MacBooks. It clicks! And, most importantly, it clicks from corner to corner, just like Apple’s haptic ones. Piano key-style trackpads in Windows laptops are easiest to click near the bottom, and they don’t click at all at the top corners. For the first time in a while, there’s a MacBook with a trackpad that actually, physically moves. And I’m genuinely intrigued to learn how it feels in day-to-day use and how Apple achieved this.

In general, the Neo is a fascinating set of tradeoffs. It has a full, even bezel around the 13-inch screen, instead of a notch for the camera and sensors. All the ports — the two USB-C slots and a headphone jack — are on the left side of the device, and there’s a slim speaker on each side that looks a lot like an SD card slot. The USB-C port closer to the hinge is USB3, which is used for connecting to a single external display. The other is USB2, and Apple reps said if you plug your display into the wrong one, macOS will notify you to make the switch. (The ports are not physically labeled.) Both USB-C ports can be used for charging, but there’s no MagSafe like the MacBook Air and Pro models.

The 13-inch screen isn’t quite as good as the larger and more colorful screen on the Air, but looked good enough in a short demo. The A18 Pro obviously can’t compare to Apple’s latest M5 chip, but at least so far seems to handle basic tasks without a problem. The webcam is 1080p and doesn’t have any extras like Center Stage. But, well, it’s a MacBook webcam.

Ultimately, the question for the Neo will be whether Apple got these tradeoffs right enough to make this a compelling $599 laptop, rather than just something from which to talk yourself into a MacBook Air. There are only two Neo options: a $599 model with 256GB of storage, and a $699 model with 512GB and a TouchID sensor. Both models will be available to students via Apple’s education discount, costing $499 and $599, respectively. But the fact that Neo cannot be had with more than 8GB of RAM, even if you opt for the 512GB storage model, immediately seems like one of the worst things about the device.

We’ll know much more once we actually get to review the Neo, which we’ll do as soon as we can along with much of Apple’s other recently announced MacBooks, monitors, iPhone, and iPad.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Update, March 4th: Added an embedded video, updated photos, and a mention of the screen size and non-backlit keyboard in the body text.