Tech/A few months with the Macbook Neo

In late March 2026 I've purchased a Macbook Neo. Three months in I've decided to write a short review. Sure, there are a bunch of reviews on the internet, but still, here is mine.

Context

Personal reviews must be considered in the context they're written, which essentially derives from the answer to the following question: "what do I use my macbook neo for?"

My macbook neo is essentially a glorified firefox/thunderbird machine. Yeah I still run some geeky stuff (mainly Ghostty) but I don't really do anything fancy on this laptop. I have my trusty Lenovo ThinkStation C30 for heavy stuff, where i access GNU/Linux virtual machines via http or ssh.

Also: i have an M4 Pro 16" Macbook Pro (36GB) from work and that's my benchmark for a "crazy fast machine".

The good

• The price (599€) is essentially unbeatable. Also, a friend of mine let me use their student discount so I managed to actually buy the 699€ model for 599€.
• Battery lasts a lot. How much? I don't really know because I've never actually been bothered to check. It's that good.
• Performance is okay
  • Okay in the sense that I've only occasionally noticed a slight slow down (and then realized i had a bunch of firefox tabs open)
  • It's generally very very snappy although not as snappy as the M4 Macbook Pro
  • Generally absolutely responsive during most activities
• Super lightweight!
• Super tiny, looks like a large Moleskine notebook.
• The keyboard is very good. Worse than the macbook pro, but still very good.
• The display is bright enough.
• Audio quality is okay (although I mostly use bluetooth audio)

The "meh"

• two usb-c ports, with one being usb-2.0
  • it hasn't really been bothering me much. i have a multi-port dongle anyway (from previous jobs)
• the low-power cpu means i could probably realistically extend its battery life with one of those power-banks designed for mobile phones. i never needed that yet though.

The bad

• Touchpad: yeah the force-touch is much better.
• Keyboard: you don't understand how nice having a backlit keyboard is until you don't have it.
• gpu memory and usb-c video?
  • I've noticed some weird behavior where if i'm using a lot of system memory the external display (connected via usb-c) might come and go
  • freeing up some memory seems to alleviate this issue
  • i've noticed something similar on the Macbook Pro
  • this might also be due to my Philips display (money badly spent)
• Driving the internal display at 1920x1200 results in blurry text
• can't really use a webcam cover?
  • there is not enough space for one of those 9mm sliding and adhesive webcam cover, and it doesn't look like macbook-neo-specific covers have reached the market yet
• laptop hard-shell covers haven't really reached the market yet, so I'm stuck with my light-grey external color
  • the other available colours are a bit... childish ?

All in all, all these "bad" sides are not really a deal-breaker, and I only notice them because I have a much higher-end machine from work (which I would never buy with my own money, of course).

Would I buy it again?

Absolutely.

I occasionally think the perfect private laptop for me would be something like the 15" macbook air, but then i remember it costs like 4x the price and I wouldn't be doing much more over there.