How could Apple not see this coming? Or maybe they did, hence the non-backlit keyboard and mediocre trackpad. Otherwise this thing would have eaten the MacBook Air alive, justified or not (you know how people are).
Most important lesson: Nobody actually gives a shit about “huge bezels”, not even those moronic YouTubers obsessed with thinness. Nobody needs a screen to “blend in” with the wallpaper behind it or weird cutouts. Getting used to whatever isn’t good enough. Slap nice chunky black bezels on it and take the win. They work for a reason. And they’re apparently friends with “fun colors”, too.
I am pretty sure they did. But it goes deeper than that. Remember that the Neo uses a iPhone SoC stack, and that it wasn’t designed specifically for a laptop. I think we got the Neo because of a softening smartphone market and Apple’s current commitments to purchase SoCs from their chip fabs.
Apple had an excess of iPhone 16 chips with 8 gb of onboard SoC stack memory in stock or outstanding obligations to purchase, with no real demand for the model of iphone 16 they were meant to power.
So they did a little bippity-boppty-boo and poof, we got the Neo and it has been a hit. Probably exceeded all Apple’s expectations on interest and sales. So now when they hit the next iPhone iteration’s mid-tier fall-off in sales they have a built in secondary market for the SoCs they don’t sell in the first wave. In that regard it’s rather smart.
So, no, I don’t think we will see the end of the Neo any time soon, even if this first version sells out and isn’t immediately out back into production. The fact that the next iteration will get a RAM boost is less a sign that the product line in question has proven insanely popular and that Apple is listening to the market and more a sign that Apple sees a need for the next generation of smartphones to have more ram. I wonder if the Neo 2 will climb in price in accordance with the increased ram. Time will tell on that one.
Good afternoon! I can give you my perspective on the Air. I recently bought the MBA M5 and…it’s almost everything the Pro used to be. It handles LLM 27B locally without breaking a sweat, and the temperature hasn’t gone above 30°C at any point. The M5 chip is a beast. It’s true that I bought mine with 24GB of RAM precisely because I use it for everything, including local AI, but for the price, you get an all-in-one computer that fits in your backpack and can do (almost) everything. Except for very specific tasks with a heavy workload, I wouldn’t go for an MBP.
So… I bit the bullet… I sneakily write on my work MacBook Pro, but I have now bought a Neo as a dedicated writing machine. And I love it. Only thing I would change? A backlit keyboard. Other than that, the perfect machine for Scrivener.
Good on you. I thought it would be a good writing machine.
I’m back. Possibly getting the Neo on Thursday.
How does Scrivener run on it?
A week or so into using a Neo as my main writing machine, and I have no issues. Perfectly smooth.
Good to know, as I plan to install Scrivener in the Neo as well.
Typically I have Scrivener open, plus Apple Pages (with multiple tabs of Word docs of crit feedback). Plus, Discord (for our writing community) and Safari (a few tabs of research). All of that and everything just works fine, and never feels sluggish or unresponsive. Okay it’s not quite as silky smooth as my MacBook Pro (my day-job machine that I use for coding), but it’s fast enough. Considering the Neo is £600, and my MacBook Pro was closer to £4000, the Neo is wildly impressive. The battery life is outstanding too (easily a 10 hour writing day, with bags of battery to spare at the end).
How does it handle YouTube?
You know they frequently use video playback as a typical use case to get those really nice battery hours, right? [1] 
So it handles YouTube fine, you say?
Phew! As someone who watches A LOT of video on my computer, this is very nice to know.
That’s one of the least demanding tasks (and thus not requiring much energy), at least these days with hardware decoding. Unless you throw 8k at 480 fps 3D HDR with 10 channel surround sound at it – I don’t know if that’s even possible on YouTube – it’ll work just fine.
Well, I like watching long videos on YouTube (movies included), so this is nice 
For a time I had 2017 MacBook Air hooked up to a 4k screen (at 60 fps). It dropped a frame here and there every once in a while, looking at the playback stats, but nothing noticeable. This thing was already ancient when it was sold brand-new (Intel i5). Apple never advertised this. It worked anyways. Anything at the level of an M1 (that’s roughly the Neo) will likely experience video playback as “idle”.
What’s your current Mac, BTW?
The one I’m typing this on right now is a 2020 iMac (Intel), pretty much the last 27" base model, before this whole product line got axed without a replacement. Nothing fancy, just added a bit more third-party RAM (something you can’t do anymore on newer Macs).
Oh, and little M1 MBA companion, also a base model. I would buy both machines again in 2026 if they came out brand new tomorrow, that’s how they still feel. (But of course you get much more bang for your buck in 2026, so this idea is more a thought-experiment.)
I sort of miss when Apple allowed you to upgrade stuff.
I haven’t watched many on it, but they claim all day watching YT as well.
Technically, the Neo has a better video decoder than the M1 Max MacBook Pro specifically for this sort of thing: the A18 chip has VC1 hardware decompression for high-bitrate streams (such as YouTube): Now a MacBook Pro has enough oophf to decode using a combination of software and the other decoders, but the Neo should be able to do that purely with hardware and consume less power… I mean, in theory 
(This is why the 1st gen Apple TV 4K can only play YouTube at 1440p: it doesn’t have VC1, so cannot handle the throughput of 4K YouTube - but it’s fine with other less intensive codecs)