Apple Silicon is the gift that keeps on giving, entailing not only insane performance boosts for Apple's ever-expanding portfolio of products but also unlocking the kind of granular control that would have been impossible with off-the-shelve chips from Intel and AMD. And now, Apple's A18 Pro has just awarded huge bragging rights to the MacBook Neo, albeit with an equally huge catch.
Apple's MacBook Neo gets huge bragging rights with a sizable catch
Apple finally unveiled its much-anticipated MacBook Neo earlier this week, bringing a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2,408 x 1,506 resolution and 500 nits brightness, uniform bezels, Touch ID, dual-firing speakers that support Spatial Audio, a 1080p front camera, a brightly colored aluminum frame that exudes a premium-build feel, and color-matching keyboard to the proverbial table.
Of course, the device also entailed a litany of compromises, including two USB-C ports with wildly different characteristics and no way of knowing which is which until you actually plug in your peripheral, a heavily binned A18 Pro SoC, 8GB of RAM, and a hobbled trackpad that lacks pressure-sensing ability and haptic feedback.
We noted recently how the MacBook Neo delivers a 43 percent performance jump over the M1 MacBook Air, which speaks volumes as to the superiority of Apple's A18 Pro chip. Now, however, the chip has gained some additional hefty bragging rights, courtesy of a new single-core Geekbench 6 test that pitted the $599 MacBook Neo against the $13,000 Mac Pro that sports Intel's 28-core Xeon W chip.
In the test, the MacBook Neo outperformed the $13,000 Mac Pro by a whopping 3x. However, there is a huge catch inherent within this comparison: almost every conceivable program is multi-threaded these days, and for tasks where the single-core metric is important, the MacBook Neo's 8GB RAM would constitute a substantial bottleneck.
In practical terms, this test grants the MacBook Neo some very hefty but inadvertently hollow bragging rights. It does, however, showcase the superiority of Apple Silicon over Intel's latest and greatest from just a few years back, and if you're interested in grabbing one of these units, Amazon is taking pre-orders, starting from $599 for the base model with 256GB storage and $699 for the 512GB variant. We also recommend checking out our detailed buying guide, where we compare the MacBook Neo to the M5 MacBook Air to see which one is a better fit for you.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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