Look, I've been a Windows user for a long time, okay? And I'm not ashamed to
admit Apple's looking pretty nice right now. The things they're doing, I'm kind
of like, "Okay, friends." [laughter] I'm talking, of course, about the Apple
MacBook Neo. It was leaked a little bit. People knew that the a MacBook was
coming or likely to be coming uh with an iPhone chip in it. That is heavier than
I expected. Wow. Maybe I just haven't held a new MacBook in in a while. But
that's that's got heft to it. I think they put the whole iPhone in there.
Anyway, Apple did it. They took the A18 Pro that launched with the iPhone 16
Pros and they knocked a GPU core off.
So, there's five GPU cores instead of six now. And they stuck it in the
MacBook Neo and encased it in this these fun new
colors. That's the best part. Look at this. Oh, okay. What is this? Citrus.
Now, if you've been paying attention to the launch of the Neo at all, you
understand that people are very excited about this laptop despite it having like
a phone chip. That's not exciting. Except that the phone chip is a bit more
powerful than the first Apple silicon chip that they put in the MacBook after
dropping Intel by the wayside. We're not just talking about any phone chip. We're
talking about Apple silicon, which has like transformed the industry and
remains the standard for laptop processors. They're good. Not only are
the chips good, this is a MacBook that you can get for $600, $500 if you're a
student, US. It's crazy. Anyway, let's see what else is in that box. Designed
by Apple in California. I certainly hope so.
Trackpad. We're going to get to the trackpad. It's not haptic. Lock key. We
did not get the version that has the Touch ID on the key, but we'll we'll get
to that all later. In the box, interestingly, is a 20 watt charger,
USBC to C cable as well. Now, some people have expressed concern about some
of the specs of the MacBook Neo, including the fact that it has a 20 watt
charger. It's quite low for a laptop. It's low for a phone these days. That's
a 5ft cable, baby. Let's go. You know
how I can tell? Don't ask. Aka 1.5 m. it
apparently, you know, it takes about an hour or over an hour to to charge from 0
to 100, but you can connect it to more powerful chargers and get like a little
bit faster charging speed. The other thing to note here is that it's not Mag
Safe. Every other MacBook for a while has come with MagSafe. Apple took it
away and then they brought it back. This one doesn't get it cuz it's still a
student. It has to earn MagSafe. But how annoying will it be to not have Mag
Safe? Well, let's let's see. Let's take a look at the actual
Now, I've heard people say it's got a one finger touch, one finger openable
lid. Ooh, that's nice. This has really
given me the same vibes I got when I got
my first MacBook. It was a plastic Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook that I used for
university and it was beloved by me.
Man, that is a color. I mean, you probably can't really get the
appreciation for it uh via the video here. Maybe on that one. Does that look
colorful to you? Do you see the color in
person? It's really catching the light in a way that like I don't think it's
going to come across properly on the video. I usually do not care about
colors at all. As you know, I'm a minimalist. Everything should be gray or
black or white. But this is making me feel things. And that's really what's
all what it's all about. We need tech that makes us feel things more. Oh, but
before we really start playing with it, we got to take a look at the exterior
here. And yes, they got that crazy color. We got a very, very smooth, nice
finish on this. I mean, it's 600 bucks, 500 bucks with a discount. But I think
the thing that's blowing everyone's minds is the fact that it's that price
and like it feels and looks like an a a
high-end Apple product. Like if they if you told me that Apple released a small,
you know, 13-in MacBook Pro in fun colors and you handed this to me, I'd be
like, "Oh, yeah, you I believe you. I'm also very gullible, but I believe you."
Now, while it does have that nice kind of smooth aluminum enclosure that you
would expect from a MacBook, there are some obvious design differences here.
One being that the aforementioned Mag Safe is not there. Instead, we have two
USBC ports. The one on the left here is USB 3. whatever kind of USB 3 gets you
10 Gbits per second of of transfer speed. I think it's USB 3.2 Gen 2 X1.
And the USBC port on the right here is USB 2 speeds. You're only getting 480
megabytes per second from that, which is, you know, somewhat disappointing.
However, use that thing for charging, for like, you know, mouse, keyboard,
accessories, or whatever. And then this can be more for like dongles. Okay. At
the very least though, they do have a headphone jack. So, we haven't uh we
haven't come up with some silly excuse for uh removing the headphone jack on
MacBooks yet. Next to that, we have what many might assume from far away is an uh
SD card slot. It's not. Those are the speakers. These days, we're used to
MacBook speakers being upward-f facing, but these are side facing. And there's
another one on the other side along with no other ports on the sides or the
front. We've got these grippy feet on the bottom that are they look way
lighter on the top down than they look in person. And we've got eight torque
screws on the bottom. So, you can remove it and uh you know, fiddle around in
there. You're not going to be able to change much because you know this is a
Apple silicon chip. The RAM is soldered.
I'm not sure about the SSD. There has been some kind of like third-party
fiddling around with unofficial ways to replace the SSD. That's all at your own
risk, though. You might screw something up. I don't know. I'm I'm not recommending you do it. I'm just saying
people have done it. All right, let's open it up again and look at one of the
many cool things about this laptop. This is a Magic Keyboard. It's the same sort
of keyboard that you get on the other MacBooks. It feels good to type on. If
you've ever felt if you've ever typed on a Magic Keyboard, it's kind of like the
best laptop keyboard on the market. Someone's going to get at me in the
comments, but like it's good. Okay, it's f it's more than fine. The one big
downside with this keyboard is that there's no backlighting. It'll make
people who use computers uh only in the dark sad. However, they are white keys
as opposed to the black keys found on pretty much every other MacBook as far
as I'm aware. So, I should say sorry, they're not like white. They're actually
like a very subtle uh shade of the same
color as the laptop. So, if you get the other colors, blush, indigo, and
>> just silver, >> just silver, the keys will kind of like be a variation of those colors as well.
Down here, another interesting choice. It does not have the taptic engine in
the touchpad. For like a decade, MacBooks have had touchpads that do not
have like a mechanical clicky action to it. It's just got a little vibration in
it that makes it feel like you're clicking. But I guess they could save a little bit of money by designing a whole
new trackpad that has a mechanical click to it. It's like a clicky trackpad. You
can see it kind of going down in all different corners. Just the fact that
they're launching this this computer for $600. We'll get into this, but is it
Apple being really good or is it just the industry just really sucking? Maybe
a bit of both. I don't know. So, above that, we have one of the other areas
that Apple may have kind of, you know, saved a little bit of money on in a
reasonable way, perhaps. 13-in IPS
display goes up to 500 nits, uh, 60 Hz
with a 248x506
resolution. It only has support for the sRGB color space and it also doesn't
have true tone which it kind of changes the color temperature of the screen uh
depending on your environment. I always thought that was kind of weird. Uh but
other people like it, you know, regardless it's not here because it's
$600. It's also worth pointing out here that the USB 3 port on the left or on
the back does support DisplayPort output. You can power a monitor at 60 Hz
I think up to was it 4K? Wow. Okay. but
only one. You know, now that like we're logged in, we're in macOS, it's a
little surreal to have a device that like looks this fun and I know is that
inexpensive and you know, you're here. You're you're using an Apple product.
The vibe is that Apple wants this to be like a lot of people's first Apple
product so they can convince you to pay for a subscription for something,
anything, cuz they're getting a lot of money from services these days. Okay,
let's start using this thing right after this message from our sponsor Dbrand.
and they sent over one of their new 1984 MacBook skins. Now, this one is color
match for our Citrus device, but they've got eight different hues for pretty much
every modern MacBook colorway. Now, if you're wondering, why would I put a
citrus skin on my citrus MacBook Neo?
Uh, but the answer is to get a classic Apple logo like this one. Look at the
colors. It's kind of like if 1984 Apple
made a 2026 MacBook. Plus, the logo is
3D printed to really make it pop. You can feel it. There's texture. Put some
texture in your life. These retrostyled 1984 skins are available for a ton of
MacBooks, new and old. And if you want to see how it'll look on your MacBook
and pick up a skin for yourself, head on over to my bosseshort.com.
So, yes, we are in macOS, but it's not a normal MacBook, okay? It's got a phone
chip in it. Let's not forget that. Now, my first thought it was to load Premiere
because I know that it's probably less optimized uh on this hardware than
Apple's own firstparty apps. Um, and I have experience with it. So, we're going
to see how it handles like 4K footage or whatever. But, obviously, at 600 bucks,
they're not targeting this machine towards like hardcore creative video
editors and like people that do that for work. However, I've I've seen a lot of
people say that like, yeah, it'll, you
know, it'll do browsing, it'll do word processing, it'll do light photo
editing, it'll do whatever, like just fine, you know? But we're seeing claims
that Apple's chips just are at the point now where you can push it a little bit
farther and it's not going to like totally break down. It'll kind of slow
down a little bit as you put throw more at it. Anyway, I'm going to just going
to click around and see if I have any subjective complaints about, you know,
slow down or anything. We're going to get to the Labs results in a minute. We
downloaded Chrome in a few seconds there. This thing's got Wi-Fi 6E and
Bluetooth 6. So, I've got a few tabs open in Safari. I downloaded Chrome. I
got some tabs open in that. We're playing videos. LT Store. We got Amazon,
apple.com. We got open I open a bunch of things. And so far, I'm not seeing any
slowdown in terms of like quickly. I was I was doing it quick. You should have
seen it. This is far from an objective benchmark, but I think that like I'm
using this laptop. It feels like using a MacBook. So far, I haven't really
encountered anything where I'm like, ooh, Apple really I've tried to emulate
Chromebooks in a bit too much. It's not happened. I feel taken care of, which
I've talked about a lot on this channel. I like that. Hello, slightly older Riley
in a different sweater because we gave the MacBook Neo to the Labs team. They
did some testing overnight. So, we got some battery numbers as well and they
gave it back to us. Here's what we found. As other people have found in
their testing, the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo is kind of around the M1
chip uh in a ballpark sense in Cinebench. Uh we got 12% better in
single thread and 17% slower in
multi-thread. The Neo is obviously behind the M4 and the M5 in uh Cinebench
there, but uh it's actually impressively close in single thread. Uh multi-thread
is where it really struggles just because it's got way less cores. Well,
and for other reasons as well. Now, Labs put the laptops that we're testing here
through a couple of browserbased benchmarks, Jetream and Motion Mark
1.3.1. uh because you know using a browser,
using light apps is going to be what you're primarily doing on a machine like
this. And in those tests, the Neo uh
once again outperformed uh the M1 MacBook Air in Jetream 2.0 and is
actually impressively close to the other ones as well. Uh in Motion Mark though,
which is a little bit more intensive, uh it fell behind all three of its I don't
want to say competitors because they're also Apple MacBooks, but you know, now
while Labs was putting this thing through its paces, uh we were able to
get some Fleer camera uh shots of the
hot spots on there. So, if you're curious as to what spots on the laptop
get hot, these are the ones. And uh 42° C was the absolute top temperature that
they recorded, which Lab says is, you
know, shy of the 50° mark where they start they say that's where things start
getting like uncomfortably hot. So I I wouldn't expect you to burn your fingers
on this thing or anything. I don't think it could burn you if you tried. It's pure of heart. Now to what is probably
one of the more interesting uh benchmark numbers for this kind of device, battery
discharge. With the time we had, we were able to test this against the MacBook
Air M4 and the MacBook Air M5. Both known for having very good battery life.
And uh despite the Neo having a quite a
bit smaller battery, 36 1/2 W hours versus 53.8
W hours, the Neo was able to last 6 hours 46 minutes 25 seconds, which was
behind, you know, the over 8 hours that uh the other laptops were able to
achieve. But that is streaming 1080p video off a Plex server uh constantly at
200 nits brightness in low power [music] mode. Um so if you're not just watching
video literally all day, you know, that's nearly 7 hours of use with
Apple's excellent standby time, you're looking at easy uh full day of use for
like a student IMO. Optimally, I'd love
to get even more in-depth with numbers and testing. Uh but this is a short
circuit. We actually are working on a full LTT review of this thing. So stay
tuned to LTT. I guess that's kind of throwing ShortCircuit under the bus
here. Sorry. So raw performance aside, what about some more kind of quality of
life things? The speakers. Laptops
famously often just have poor speakers. Not so with MacBooks. MacBooks usually
have really good speakers. iMacs generally pretty good. You know, as
someone who watched movies for a long time before I had a TV, we watched
movies on a MacBook on an iMac. So, we're going to do our standard crab rave
audio testing. They're coming out the side. It's weird to see a MacBook with
speakers that little like like that dinky. I usually
usually have like these big speaker grills.
Okay.
I've seen people complaining about these speakers. Like they're like, "Ah, they're not so good. They're not very
good." Like, these are pretty good speakers for a laptop. Okay. I guess I'm
just, you know, I've seen a lot of bad laptops in my life. I think the people
that complain about the speakers are probably just like regular MacBook users
and they're used to a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro and they're like, "These are
worse speakers." And it's like they might they they are right.
But like because I heard that these speakers weren't as good as the other
ones, I was expecting them to be bad. But these are not like I wouldn't call
these bad. They're not like amazing, but
like [music]
there's like a little bit of mids. There's like a little bit of mids
missing, but like there's still like a a healthy amount of bass and and highs. I
also generally kind of like take a look at the the colors and stuff in this
video, but like, you know, it looks uh I got no real complaints. It maybe looks a
little bit kind of cooler. I'm not like
kind of blown away in the in the way that I usually am when looking at like
an iPad display or a MacBook display. It
looks more normal. Big props to Apple for their, you know, retina thing where
they basically put as much resolution in a certain size display as they think is
like proper for the human eye to appreciate. It works. I don't know what
to tell you. Webcam. So far, I got to say, using the trackpad has been totally
fine, but that's also because I'm used to Windows trackpads more so than
MacBook trackpads. So, like to me, this seems normal. Uh MacBook people may feel
like, oh, it's a step down. just based off this, maybe this maybe the actual
file will look better, but the preview is making me think that this is
definitely a step down than the normal level of Apple quality than I that I
would uh expect. Once again, $600
MacBook, what are you going to do? It's pretty good. It's fine. You know, like
for a student, this is this is what you this is all you get. Graduate and then
talk to me. So, as for battery life, Apple put a 36 1/2Wh hour battery in
here. Apple says that'll get you 11 hours of wireless web browsing and 16
hours of video playback. I appreciate Apple giving the actual like wireless
web browsing number, the estimate for the battery life there, because that's
kind of what this is going to be primarily used for. Now, I've seen a lot
of people say it's only got 8 gigs of RAM. You know, it's it's got 8 gigs of
unified memory as part of that A18 Pro chip. that can punch a little bit above
its weight class on an Apple device where they've so heavily optimized
everything and you're using firstparty Apple apps. And the other thing to keep
in mind here is that especially if you're coming from a Windows ecosystem,
8 gigs of RAM is not enough. You're right, it's not. But this is not a
Windows device. And I think that a lot of people are going to find out now that
macOS is available at a at a lower price point. It's true. there's been the
Refurb, you know, store and you've been able to get like discounted MacBook Airs
for a while. And based on the impressions and reviews that we're seeing about this thing so far, there's
probably a good contingent of people who are going to look at this thing and be
like, "Yeah, this is really cool, but I do need a little bit more juice." And
you're going to go for like a Refurb M4 MacBook Air for a few couple hundred
bucks more or something. Or maybe you can find a M3 one used. Like regardless,
this represents a cool new entry point
into the macOS ecosystem where 8 GB can
potentially act like more than 8 GB. As I said, this is the 256 gig version, the
base model. There is one available upgrade up to 512 gigs of internal
storage that will also get you the Touch ID power button, which is like an
interesting thing for them to like link those two together. Apple's ways are
mysterious. That upgrade costs $100 uh USD. Um, but it does not upgrade that 8
gigs of RAM. I know a lot of you are stressed about the 8 gigs of RAM. Okay,
you're thinking, "What? 8 gigs of RAM? How am I supposed to run my local LLMs
and uh generate all of my content?"
You're not supposed to. You're not supposed to do that. This thing reminds
me of that plastic MacBook that I had
back in 2006. I shouldn't date myself like that, I guess, but that's when I
had it. and it had your garage band on it and me and my friends would fool
around and make fun songs and like I love that Apple is still putting that
stuff, you know, some of that stuff on here and taking their beautiful
hardware, well optimized hardware and putting it out there for 600 bucks.
Students can get it. They can learn to create things. Okay, we have to learn to
create again and buy beautiful tools that have cool colors on them. I'm not
saying that other companies can't make beautiful hardware. They can, but uh
that's not the thing that's in front of me right now. It's the MacBook Neo. And
that's basically all I have to say about it. So, thanks for watching Short
Circuit. Uh subscribe, and if you're looking for something else to watch,
check out our other video on the MacBook Air. If this isn't quite going to cut it
for you, maybe that will. Okay, we're we're in our Apple glazing era. Go
Apple.