Apple MacBook Neo Review: Delicious, Low-Hanging Fruit

I did spin up Oceanhorn 3, a new, graphically-intense game in Apple Arcade that Apple has been touting. Unfortunately, the play experience was pretty rough. It struggled to play smoothly at image quality that I’d call “good enough.” That was disappointing. And yet, as seen in 3DMark Steel Nomad Light benchmark I used, the MacBook Neo still earned a 40 percent better score than the HP OmniBook 5. Graphics have been the biggest weakness of the Snapdragon X chips as a whole.

On the other hand, the Snapdragon X, which launched in early 2025, has a substantial lead over the A18 Pro in multi-core CPU performance. It’s not close, either. The Snapdragon X in the HP OmniBook 5 is 47 percent faster in multi-core performance as tested in Cinebench 2026. For any heavier tasks that the system can spread across cores, Qualcomm’s same-priced Windows laptops significantly outperform the Neo. That includes compiling code, rendering video, and running complex formula in Excel, but also something as simple as heavy multitasking where you’re running two complex applications simultaneously.

As a whole, the problem of performance with the MacBook Neo isn’t around the A18 Pro. Instead, it’s around the storage performance and memory. The speed of the laptop’s SSD is considerably slower than the competition. With average write speeds of around 1,350 megabits per second (and 1,450 read speeds), this is pre-Apple Silicon levels of SSD performance, meaning large downloads feel slow, as does working with those large files. It’s about half as fast as the SSD on the M1 MacBook Air, for reference.

But the biggest point of contention with the MacBook Neo’s performance is the restriction to just 8 GB of unified memory. My simple workflow on a MacBook Air, which involves a couple dozen Chrome tabs, Slack, and Spotify, would normally eat up around 12.75 GB of memory. At idle on the MacBook Neo, I noticed in the Activity Monitor that the system takes around 4 GB just to run the operating system with no applications open. That is a recipe for disaster. MacOS is quite efficient at using something called “swap memory” as needed to avoid slowdowns or crashes due to limited RAM. But they will happen if you push the system a bit. I found that limit by piling on 20 or so Safari tabs, multiple streaming YouTube videos, Spotify, a few applications, and an open video call. At that point, things started to really slow down. My RAM usage was approaching 7 GB, and the Swap Used memory was nearing a full gigabyte. That’s going to be more than the average person is purposefully using, but using the MacBook Neo means being more mindful of what’s open in a way that you never have to do with a MacBook Air.

This limited RAM may become an even larger problem in the future. MacOS has only grown more memory-intensive as its evolved, and the more AI is built-into subsystems and background software, the bigger a problem 8 GB of RAM will become. A good example is Spotlight, which recently got updated with lots of new features and takes around 170 MB of RAM in the background at all times.