Apple MacBook Neo review: Delicious, low-cost fruit

I’ve been spinning Oceanhorn 3a new graphic-intensive game in Apple Arcade that Apple has been promoting. Unfortunately, the gameplay was very difficult. I struggled to play smoothly with image quality that I call “good enough.” That was disappointing. However, as we saw in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light benchmark I used, the MacBook Neo still got a 40 percent better score than the HP OmniBook 5. Graphics were the biggest weakness of the Snapdragon X chipset as a whole.

On the other hand, the Snapdragon It’s not even close. The Snapdragon This includes compiling code, viewing video, and running a complex formula in Excel, but it also includes something as simple as heavy multitasking where you run two complex applications simultaneously.

Overall, the performance issue with the MacBook Neo is not related to the A18 Pro. Instead, it’s about storage and memory performance. Laptop SSD speed is much slower than competitors. With average write speeds of around 1,350MBps (and 1,450 read speeds), this is pre-Apple Silicon SSD performance levels, meaning large downloads feel slow, as do those larger files. It’s about half as fast as the SSD found in the M1 MacBook Air, for reference.

But the biggest sticking point with the MacBook Neo’s performance is the unified memory limitation of just 8GB. My simple workflow on a MacBook Air, which includes a few dozen Chrome, Slack, and Spotify tabs, typically takes up about 12.75GB of memory. In idle mode on my MacBook Neo, I noticed in Activity Monitor that it only took about 4GB for the system to boot the operating system without opening any applications. This is a recipe for disaster. MacOS is very efficient at using what’s called “memory swapping” as needed to avoid slowdowns or crashes due to limited RAM. But it will happen if you stress the system a little. I found this limiting by cramming 20 or so tabs into Safari, streaming multiple videos on YouTube, Spotify, a few apps, and an open video call. At that point, things started to really slow down. RAM usage was close to 7GB, and swap memory used was close to a full gigabyte. This would be more than the average person uses intentionally, but using a MacBook Neo means being more aware of what’s open in a way you don’t need to do with a MacBook Air.

This limited RAM may become a bigger problem in the future. MacOS has become more memory-hungry as it has evolved, and the more AI built into its subsystems and background programs, the bigger the 8GB of RAM problem becomes. A good example of this is Spotlight, which was recently updated with a lot of new features and consumes about 170MB of RAM in the background at all times.