On an earnings call in late April, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was "off the charts," and the popularity of the laptop has reportedly led the company to significantly boost production. Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo this week said he believes that MacBook Neo shipments to Apple were doubled from an initial target of 5 million units to 10 million units in 2026 at some point after the laptop launched in March.
If you already had an iPhone then the Neo makes a lot of sense. I love responding to text messages with a full keyboard. You can share browser tabs between the two, copy/paste across devices among other things(Apple’s handoff feature). You can also install and run phone/tablet apps directly on it or phone mirror other apps that don’t allow it(up to developer).
The Neo is a great laptop that I keep on the arm of the couch in my living room. Charge it about once a week or so and use it for my normal browsing instead of my phone. It starts instantly when you crack the lid. Faster even than a MacBook Pro I had for work several years ago(Intel based).
It plays simple games like Balatro or Mini Motorways great. It can play more demanding titles but the battery life does start to suffer.
For the price range the screen, size, and build are top tier. The only thing I kind of miss is an illuminated keyboard but that’s a minor nitpick.
I had another use case for a laptop which was kind of niche. I every so often need to make updates/changes to vehicle software and a laptop is ideal. The issue is that software is windows only. Yes, it runs in wine but it’s kind of a pain. The Neo supports UTM which is a virtual machine software specifically built for Apple Silicon and it runs windows great. So installing that app, windows, and syncing it up to my vehicle was normal fair. I didn’t want to have a cheap windows laptop around for only that purpose that I wouldn’t use otherwise. I found that people in the forum for that vehicle software had the same thought about the Neo that I did. So I knew it worked for this purpose before purchasing.