MacBook Neo: my first week with the $600 laptop
And the verdict is....
As many of you know, I bought the new MacBook Neo laptop recently for a trip to Europe, as an alternative to lugging my uber-heavy MacBook Pro 16 inch laptop.
With a great starting price of $600 (I paid $700 for the extra RAM and storage, from 256 GB to 512 GB) and the same weight as a MacBook Air (which starts at $1,100) I figured why not?
And the verdict after a week: I’m glad I made the decision. Having a zippy, light and smaller laptop to tote around is a joy. The alternatuve? A $329 iPad with a keyboard? Nah. Too bulky and cumbersome. And since I’m a Mac guy, I have no interest in a cheap Windows machine or a Chromebook.
I’m attached to my laptop. On trips, I use it to book last-minute tours, look up things, write scripts, respond to e-mails and comments and write. I’m old-school. The phone is great, but I like having the extra real estate of a larger screen to work with.
And notice I said zippy. Skeptics wondered how that could be. Apple always touts its more powerful M series computer chips that are capable of doing things unheard of in a laptop years ago. The Neo uses a less powerful iPhone chip to run it, and supposedly, photo and video editing would suffer.
But I didn’t buy it for that.
I wrote an article on the plane.. That’s a simple sentence, but something that has been very hard to do, if not impossible with my large 16 inch MacBook. The airlines have gotten so tight, that it’s been very rare for me to even be able to open it. Especially if the moron in front of me leans back all the way,, which makes the process impossible.
On our recent Delta flight, the awful human being in front of me did lean back, yet I was still able to open the Neo up and write! Not easily, but I could do it.
On the ground with the Neo I argued with Google Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT about schedules I was trying to set up in France. I answered e-mail, downloaded photos and did some photo editing too with Photoshop.
Was the experience as fast as my MacBook Pro? No.
Did I see a difference? Frankly, for these kinds of tasks, minimal.
And my back thanks me for making the decision.
Negatives:
The Neo keyboard doesn’t light up in the dark like my 16 inch Pro does. So when writing an article on the plane, I couldn’t see what I was doing. Luckily, I write so much that I pretty much know where all the keys are.
There are only two slots on the computer and one is for power*.
I hate that. But I also bought a cheaper machine. My MacBook Pro has 3 slots, and frankly, I always have more to input than I have real estate for there too.
One perk of the new computer for me, beyond travel, would be using it as a dedicated, always plugged in machine for live streams at home. Because now, I have to unplug the 16 inch MacBook and bring it to the other side of the room to connect.
When I do livestream talk backs with Scripps News every week, I attach the laptop to a camera (Sony A7IV,) the Elgato teleprompter to see the anchor and make eye contact and the Rodecaster mixer for audio. (I use Apple AirPods to hear the anchor.)
On the Neo, in goes the audio and camera, but no slot for the prompter. So I plug in a USB-C hub that gives me more slots, and woila, the prompter won’t connect via a hub, because it needs dedicated power. So I will need another hub, a powered one. .
Small details, but I’m sure if I was Apple reading this, it would just tell me to buy another Pro model instead.
For photo editing, Photoshops runs a little slower, but for doing some basic edits—like on this shot from the Montmartre area of Paris, I didn’t experience hiccups. A little slower than my more powerful machine, but easy to live with. (You can tell that in the photo on the right, I used generative fill to remove the woman walking down the street.
Re *power, I’ve been getting the same kind of battery life as with an iPhone—about 6 to 8 hours worth, which is plenty.
All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the purchase, and won’t be taking advantage of Costco’s liberal 90 day return policy to bring it back.
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
These shots were taken on the Samsung S26 Ultra camera, which I’ve been playing around with, and and will have plenty to say about it in an upcoming newsletter. As many of you know, I swear by the iPhone—so what are my thoughts about going Android in Paris?
Stay tuned!