I’m a MacBook Pro loyalist, but how much work can I actually do on a cheap MacBook Neo? The answer shocked me (and saved me a lot of money)

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My go-to daily driver has always been a MacBook Pro — picking it to partly fulfill my diverse workload of general productivity and prosumer work, and partly to satisfy my inner speeds and feeds demon. There’s just something about seeing big numbers that feels nice, y’know.

However, the MacBook Neo is here at a third of the cost, and while I’d love to be the guy who can continue to afford expensive laptops, I’ve got a home to pay for with my wife. So how much of my day-to-day could I actually do on a Neo vs the Pro?

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You can actually do a lot more of a content creator workload on a MacBook Neo than you think.
I (and probably many other Pro users) may need to re-evaluate just how much horsepower I actually need.

Let me explain.

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Spec	MacBook Neo	M5 MacBook Pro
Starting price	$599	$1,699
Chip	A18 Pro	M5
Unified Memory	8GB	From 16GB
Storage	From 256GB	From 1TB
Display	13-inch Liquid Retina display, 2408 x 1506 resolution, 500 nits brightness	14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, 3024 x 1964 resolution, 1,000 nits brightness
Dimensions	11.7 x 8.1 x 0.5 inches	12.3 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches
Weight	2.7 pounds	From 3.4 pounds

The usability

(Image credit: Future)

I never thought a premium aluminum construction was possible in the cheaper laptop space, but here goes Apple proving the entire industry wrong — to the point that I’ve heard from my sources about some companies panicking hard and responding at Computex in a big way.

Of course, there’s the lack of a TouchID, which can be a pain if you use Apple Pay a whole lot, but typing in passwords isn’t the end of the world. Oh, and the lack of a backlit keyboard did make it a bit of a pain to find my bearings in the night — won’t be a problem for touch typists, but for clumsy…

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