I’ve been waiting for Apple to finally throw a bone to the budget-conscious crowd, and it’s officially happening. On March 4, Apple pulled back the curtain on the MacBook Neo, their first-ever “low-cost” laptop. While pre-orders are already live, we just got our first real look at what’s under the hood thanks to some fresh benchmarking leaks. It turns out Apple is trying something pretty radical here by repurposing the A18 Pro chip—the same silicon found in the iPhone 16 Pro—to power a full-blown macOS experience.
Performance and Architecture
You might be wondering if a “phone chip” can actually handle a laptop’s workload, but the early Geekbench numbers are surprisingly stout. The MacBook Neo (spotted under the identifier “Mac17,5”) clocked a single-core score of 3,980 and a multi-core score of 10,105. To put that in perspective, it’s actually outperforming the raw internal tests we saw on the iPhone 16 Pro Max from 2024.
This is likely because the laptop chassis allows for better heat dissipation than a cramped smartphone, letting that 6-core CPU breathe a bit more. It’s running on a base frequency of 4.04 GHz with 8GB of RAM, which tells me this is going to be a productivity beast for students and casual users, even if it isn’t meant for heavy 4K video editing.
The Real-World Impact
What makes this interesting for you isn’t just the raw speed; it’s the efficiency. Because the A18 Pro is built on that second-gen 3nm process, the battery life on this thing should be legendary. Plus, with a 16-core Neural Engine capable of 35 TOPS, Apple is clearly positioning this as a gateway for “Apple Intelligence” features without forcing you to drop two grand on a Pro model.
We also saw a massive MacBook Pro (2026) leak alongside this, sporting a monster M5 Max chip and 128GB of RAM, but that’s a different league entirely. The Neo is all about bringing that “Pro” iPhone snappiness to a form factor that actually fits in your backpack and doesn’t drain your bank account.
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Chipset: Apple A18 Pro (3nm architecture).
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Memory: 8GB RAM base configuration.
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OS: Ships with the latest macOS 26.3.1.
Sales officially kick off on March 11, and I’m genuinely curious to see if this marks the end of the “expensive Mac” era. If you’ve been holding onto an ancient MacBook Air because the new ones were too pricey, this might be your signal to finally upgrade.
Let’s see how this performs in real-world use once it hits the shelves next week.
