Let’s get something straight before we even begin. Apple just launched a laptop called the MacBook Neo — starting at $599 in the US — powered by an A18 Pro chip. You know, the same chip that’s inside your iPhone 16 Pro. The same phone you’ve been carrying in your pocket and occasionally dropping in the sink. And now Apple wants you to think about whether this thing stacks up against the MacBook Air M5. So let’s talk about it, because this comparison is simultaneously a perfectly reasonable thing to make and a completely absurd rabbit hole to fall into, depending on who you are and what you actually do on a computer.

First, the context. Apple hasn’t offered a truly “budget” Mac laptop since the days of the MacBook (lowercase, no Pro, no Air, no nothing) that they quietly killed off in 2019. For years, if you wanted a MacBook, your entry point was the MacBook Air, and even that was nudged upward in price with each new generation. The MacBook Neo changes that dynamic in a meaningful way. At $599 — it’s the most affordable MacBook Apple has made in years, and it comes in four actually fun colors: Silver, Blush (a soft pink), Citrus (a warm yellow), and Indigo (a deep blue). These are colors that scream “I’m not trying to look like a corporate spreadsheet machine,” and for a company that used to sell the same Space Gray and Silver laptops into infinity, that alone is a statement.​

But the MacBook Air M5 is right there in the lineup, starting at $1,099 in the US. That is a five-hundred-dollar gap in the US. Those are not small numbers. So when someone asks you, “should I get the MacBook Neo or the MacBook Air M5?” the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you do all day, and whether you’ve taken the time to actually understand what you’re giving up.​

Here’s where it gets complicated, and honestly, a bit uncomfortable for Apple’s marketing department. The MacBook Neo runs on the A18 Pro chip, which is a genuinely excellent processor — for a phone. It debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max back in 2024, and Apple has been very careful about which performance claims it makes for the Neo. The company says the Neo is “up to 50 percent faster for everyday tasks” compared to the bestselling PC with the latest Intel Core Ultra 5. That is a perfectly acceptable benchmark to throw around, but notice what Apple is carefully not saying: they’re not comparing it directly to the MacBook Air M5, because that comparison would not be particularly flattering for the Neo.

The M5 chip inside the MacBook Air is a fundamentally different beast. It has a 10-core CPU with four super cores and six efficiency cores, compared to the Neo’s 6-core CPU (two performance, four efficiency). The M5 Air has a memory bandwidth of 153GB/s. The Neo has 60GB/s. That’s not a typo. The MacBook Air M5 moves data through its system at roughly two and a half times the speed of the Neo. For creative work, video editing, running multiple applications simultaneously, or anything that actually stresses a machine, that gap is going to show up in real life. Engadget, which got hands-on time with the Neo before launch, noted flatly that “the MacBook Neo won’t be nearly as powerful as the M5 MacBook Air.“

Then there’s the RAM situation, and this is where the Neo genuinely frustrates. It comes with 8GB of unified memory, full stop. You cannot upgrade it. You cannot configure it differently. You get 8GB, and that is your entire deal. The MacBook Air M5 starts at 16GB — double the Neo right out of the box — and you can configure it all the way up to 32GB. In 2026, 8GB of RAM on a laptop that runs a full desktop operating system and asks you to run AI workloads is a genuinely tight situation. macOS is efficient, Apple’s unified memory architecture is clever, and the system will manage it as well as it possibly can. But you will notice it. Browser tabs will reload when you switch between them. Heavier apps will take longer to open. Multitasking with more than a handful of applications open at once will start to feel sluggish. If you’re a student doing light writing, browsing, and streaming, you might be fine. If you’re anyone who works on their laptop as a primary professional tool, 8GB will become a source of frustration in ways that are hard to fully articulate until you’re living with it.

Storage follows a similar story. The Neo comes in 256GB or 512GB configurations. That’s it. The MacBook Air M5 starts at 512GB and goes all the way to 4TB. For the average person who lives in the cloud and doesn’t hoard local files, 256GB is workable. For anyone who downloads projects, keeps a photo library, or works with video files even occasionally, 256GB will become tight faster than you’d expect.

Both laptops have Liquid Retina displays rated at 500 nits of brightness. So far, so good. But the Neo’s screen is 13.0 inches with a resolution of 2408 x 1506 pixels, uses sRGB color, and does not support True Tone technology. The MacBook Air M5 has a 13.6-inch display with a resolution of 2560 x 1664 pixels, supports the P3 wide color gamut, and has True Tone. If you’re a photographer, video editor, or anyone who cares about accurate color reproduction, the Air’s P3 display is meaningfully better for that kind of work. For everyone else watching YouTube and writing emails, both screens look perfectly fine in daily use.​

The port situation is also worth talking about, because it’s a place where the Neo’s budget positioning is genuinely limiting. You get two USB-C ports — one at USB 3 speeds with DisplayPort capability, and one that is USB 2. USB 2. In 2026. On a brand new laptop. The MacBook Air M5, by comparison, gives you two Thunderbolt 4 ports plus a MagSafe charging connector. This means on the Air, you can charge via MagSafe and still have both Thunderbolt 4 ports fully available for external displays, drives, or docks. On the Neo, charging eats one of your two USB-C ports, leaving you with exactly one remaining — a slower USB 3 port. If you use external accessories of any kind, this is a real daily inconvenience. No MagSafe also means no magnetic charging safety net if someone trips over your cable.

The keyboard tells a similar story of cost-cutting that is defensible but still noticeable. The Neo ships with a non-backlit Magic Keyboard — no keyboard backlighting at all, except on the 512GB model, which also happens to be the only configuration that includes Touch ID. The MacBook Air M5 has a backlit keyboard and Touch ID on every model. Not having keyboard backlighting in a dimly lit room, on a coffee call at night, or on a plane is genuinely annoying. It’s a small thing, until it isn’t.

Battery life is another area where the Air wins cleanly. The Neo has a 36.5Wh battery and Apple rates it at up to 11 hours of web browsing and 16 hours of video streaming. The MacBook Air M5 has a 53.8Wh battery rated for up to 15 hours of web browsing and 18 hours of streaming. The Air’s battery is significantly larger in capacity and the M5’s efficiency means it lasts longer across the board. For someone who works on the go, that’s not a trivial gap.

Now, here is where you stop and breathe for a second, because for all of that, the MacBook Neo is not a bad product. Not even close. For $599, you get a fanless, silent laptop built from 90% recycled aluminum, weighing 1.23kg, running a full macOS 26 Tahoe with Apple Intelligence, in a color that doesn’t look like every other laptop at the café. The A18 Pro is an excellent chip for everyday computing. For students doing coursework, for someone who needs their first Mac and genuinely cannot stretch to the Air’s price, for a secondary home computer, or for someone whose heaviest daily tasks are a browser, documents, and streaming — the MacBook Neo covers those needs at a price that was simply unavailable in the MacBook lineup before. The education pricing makes it even more compelling, coming in at $499 in the US.

The thing that makes comparing these two machines feel slightly absurd is that Apple has essentially created two completely different products for two completely different people and given them broadly similar packaging. They both look like MacBooks. They both run macOS. They both support Apple Intelligence. They both weigh 2.7 pounds. Side by side in a store, one might wonder why you’d pay an extra $500 for the Air. The answer is: performance, RAM, storage flexibility, display quality, ports, keyboard, and battery. Those are not small things if your laptop is your primary work machine. But if your laptop is mostly a consumption device with occasional light productivity, the Neo is genuinely good value in a way that Apple hasn’t offered in years.​

Apple’s lineup now goes MacBook Neo at the entry level, MacBook Air as the midrange workhorse, and MacBook Pro at the top for professionals. That structure makes sense. The Neo was always going to cannibalize some Air sales from budget-conscious buyers, and Apple knows that. They’ve simply decided that being in that market is better than ceding it entirely to Windows laptops at similar prices.

So, should you buy the MacBook Neo or the MacBook Air M5? If you are a professional who uses their laptop intensively — coding, design, photo and video work, or anything involving heavy multitasking — the answer is the MacBook Air M5, without much hesitation. The performance gap, the RAM ceiling, and the Thunderbolt ports alone justify the price difference over the life of the machine. If you’re a student, a casual user, or someone who prioritizes value and portability over raw capability, the MacBook Neo is the most interesting MacBook Apple has released in quite some time.

Just don’t go in expecting the Neo to be a discounted MacBook Air. It isn’t. It’s something else entirely — a first-generation product in a category Apple hadn’t touched in years, priced to reach new people. And for those people, that is actually a pretty remarkable thing.