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Apple's MacBook Neo is the company's first real budget MacBook, at $599, or $499 with the education discount, at launch. It runs the A18 Pro chip from the iPhone with 8GB of RAM, so the big question is whether it can run games at all if you're buying it for other things. I spent a few days with it and tried a handful of Steam games plus GeForce NOW. This is a first look at gaming on it, not a full review of the laptop.
Quick note: I bought this MacBook Neo myself. I was shopping around for an iPad replacement anyway and got the 512GB model for $599 with the discount. Nobody sent it to me.
- Cyberpunk 2077 at 800p low with MetalFX Performance holds about 30 to 45 FPS walking around, and averaged 51.88 in the benchmark. Frame times are all over the place, but it works.
- RoboCop: Rogue City pushes over 40 FPS at 800p low with MetalFX at 50%, with more stutter. A 30 FPS cap smooths it out a lot.
- Easy-to-run games like Hollow Knight: Silksong run at 60 FPS without a problem, and Apple Arcade and App Store games should be fine.
- GeForce NOW fills the gaps for games that don't run or don't exist on macOS.
- I wouldn't recommend it as a gaming laptop, but for the price I'm pretty impressed.
It reminds me of the Ryzen 4500U laptops I used to cover back in 2020. Those weren't gaming laptops either. They were really good budget laptops that could game, and they sold out everywhere. The MacBook Neo feels like Apple's version of that.
Specs
- Chip: Apple A18 Pro, 6-core CPU (2 performance, 4 efficiency), 5-core GPU with ray tracing, 16-core Neural Engine, AV1 decode
- Memory: 8GB unified
- Storage: 256GB or 512GB SSD (mine is the 512GB with Touch ID)
- Display: 13-inch Liquid Retina, 2408 × 1506, 500 nits
- Battery: up to 16 hours of video playback, 36.5Wh, 20W USB-C adapter included
- Price at launch: $599, or $499 for education (Apple)
It's clearly made to be entry-level and budget, especially for its performance and price point. Apple Arcade and App Store games are optimized for Apple silicon, so a ton of them will run just fine on the A18 Pro. I didn't spend much time on those. On Steam, only so many games work on macOS, so I tried four or five of them to get a general idea of where this thing lands, plus GeForce NOW for streaming.
Cyberpunk 2077
For bigger games like Cyberpunk, you really want to knock things down about as low as you can. I ran 800p, low settings, MetalFX Performance upscaling, which is about what I'd do on something like a Legion Go Z1 Extreme, so the 8GB of RAM can deal with it.
There are plenty of places that dip into the 20s and get pretty janky, and areas where the frame times become a mess, whether that's the CPU bottleneck or the 8GB of RAM. Walking around the world, though, it holds its own pretty well at 30 to 45 FPS, and the built-in benchmark averaged 51.88 FPS. It's a bit of a janky experience and there are lots of devices that play it much better, but it works. I've seen people play through games on much worse performance than this, and for the price, the hardware and the RAM, I still think it's pretty impressive.
RoboCop: Rogue City
RoboCop got the same aggressive treatment: 800p, low, MetalFX at 50%. I was surprised it ran at all without crashing, because this one can be pretty tough. It's an Unreal Engine 5 game and not as well optimized as Cyberpunk, so it's more stuttery and janky. Even with some poor frame times and stuttering, it pushed up over 40 FPS, which I thought was pretty surprising.
Locking it to 30 FPS helps with a lot of that stutter, other than load-in areas or maybe some disk swapping. A lot of the time you can get a steady 33.3ms, 30 FPS. Not all the time, but sometimes, and it evens out. You'll eat up the battery and it'll run pretty hot, but it works.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
I mostly just ran the benchmark here. At low settings, native 800p (no upscaling) with TAA, it ran around 30 to 35 FPS and averaged around 38 FPS at the end. I didn't get into gameplay, but it booted up and ran decently enough, with frame times that were a bit rough.
Easier games
Easy-to-run games like Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Vampire Survivors and Balatro run well here without any problem. Silksong runs at high, 1200p, 60 FPS all day long. Terminator 2D: No Fate at 1080p on its maxed-out settings runs natively at 60 FPS, no problem (I couldn't get the overlay to come up in that one). Plenty of other lighter games and emulation will run fine too.
GeForce NOW
GeForce NOW is my favorite way to cloud game. The Ultimate tier gets you RTX 5080 and 4080 hardware, and you can stream at 1200p, 1600p or higher with maxed-out settings. I don't have a great connection where I was recording, but with a good one you'll get a very, very good experience these days, especially on Ultimate. I had Resident Evil Requiem completely maxed out with path tracing on a 5080, streaming to the MacBook Neo.
It fills a large gap for games that aren't supported on macOS at all, games that don't run well enough, or when you want a lot more battery life. I know a lot of people still aren't into cloud gaming, but I love it. I use it on my desktops a lot too, since it saves install space and a lot of games feel fantastic on there.
First impressions
I'm not a macOS or MacBook user. I'm more Windows on everything, though I do have an iPhone, an Apple Watch and usually an iPad around. I was curious about this one, and for the price, I'm pretty impressed with what the MacBook Neo brings: the build quality, the overall feel, how snappy it's been and the games it's been able to run. I wouldn't recommend it as a gaming laptop, but it's a lot of fun.
At $599 for my 512GB model with the discount, I think it's a great entry point, and I think it's going to sell to a lot of people, students or otherwise. Plenty of people will hate on it and plenty will love it. If you're getting it as a budget laptop for school, email, web browsing, paying bills or other projects, you can do a lot with it, from light editing to gaming.