It still feels surreal to see a brand new Apple MacBook costing as low as Rs 70,000, or even less (if you explore third-party e-commerce platforms). For decades, badly built Windows laptops have dominated the sub-Rs 1 lakh segment, and none of their buyers has ever been happy. The pain points with these affordable laptops have been common across brands:
– Pathetic battery life usually limited to at most 5 hours.
– Poor displays.
– Crappy keyboards.
– Flimsy build
– Spammy Windows 10/11 OS
And this is where Apple comes in with the MacBook Neo – the maker of the iPhone has addressed almost all of these pain points with a MacBook that runs on last year’s iPhone processor. Get this – a MacBook running on last year’s iPhone chip can offer ample performance to deal with all your standard computing requirements, without having to boast about multi-core processors and touchscreens.
In India, you get the MacBook Neo at a starting price of Rs 69,900 for the base 256GB model, and the 512GB variant with the Touch ID fingerprint scanner demands an additional Rs 10,000. There are four pretty colours to choose from, and you get the standard 20W Apple charging adapter in the box. Yes, this one charges via the same charger you use to juice up your iPhone.
For first-time buyers and students, this feels like a revolution. However, the MacBook Neo is more than that – it might be the best laptop you could buy today, as far as you are considering value.
MacBook Neo looks and feels like a MacBook
The Neo is supposed to be affordable, but Apple didn’t make it feel cheap. Instead, this Rs 70,000 laptop comes with aluminium unibody construction with rounded corners and a matte finish on the surface, with the four colours imparting the same feel as a MacBook Pro. That’s unseen in a laptop in this price range. It weighs 1.2 kg (lighter than the MacBook Air) and feels dense when you hold it.
Open it up, and you witness the signature MacBook hinge experience – the lid doesn’t wobble, and you can still open it single-handedly. The trackpad has a satisfactory ‘click’ when you press it, and the keyboard has just the right amount of key travel and feedback. It’s a shame that Apple chose to skip backlighting on this, but the typing experience is leaps and bounds ahead of anything the Windows world has to offer.
A quality display makes it just right
While Windows laptops in this price segment now offer good LCD screens and OLED panels (some even with touch), the MacBook Neo offers a nicely-tuned LCD panel. It lacks the True Tone feature from the Air models, but the 13-inch Liquid Retina display offers sharp resolution and reaches a decent 500 nits of brightness with support for 1 billion colours. For young professionals and students, the Neo’s display looks comfortable to read, scroll content, and even watch movies. If you are into photo editing, you might need to attach to a colour-accurate display panel, but for most non-professional needs, this display can suffice. The glass display, with its superior transmittance, feels far superior to the matte-plastic/vinyl layered displays on similarly priced Windows laptops.
Performance: The iPhone chip surprises
At the heart of the MacBook Neo is the A18 Pro chip — a 6-core CPU with a 5-core GPU, which is paired with 8GB of unified memory (RAM). Don’t let this “iPhone chip” label fool you – it’s more sufficient than your average Intel Core i5-powered laptop.
For everyday tasks like web browsing, document writing, photo editing, and occasional video work (basically my work schedule), the MacBook Neo feels snappy and responsive. It handles multiple apps smoothly and even manages on-device Apple Intelligence tasks efficiently. It can deal with the resource-hungry Google Chrome decently too, and can keep things chugging smoothly as long as you don’t exceed 14 tabs (the RAM limitations kick in). Try Safari for a more efficient browsing experience.
The 8GB RAM is the only limitation here — half of what you get on the Air. Heavy multitasking or memory-intensive creative work will eventually cause slowdowns. However, for students, young office users, and casual creators, it’s more than adequate. It runs macOS 26 Tahoe smoothly and supports the full Mac software ecosystem. macOS 26 Tahoe is a spam-free and well-optimised OS, unlike Windows 11, and is a joy to work on. Apple’s first-party alternatives to MS Office apps are pre-installed for free, and they work genuinely well. The Spotlight Search functionality is a great tool for on-device file search.
And, if you have an iPhone, this MacBook will offer many benefits – copy/paste from iPhone, AirDrop for file transfers, call transfers, iPhone screen mirroring, and more.
Since it is based on the A18 Pro chip, the Neo is limited in its gaming scope too. Hence, you will be able to play mobile-centric games with ease, but most console-quality games from the App Store could push the Neo over its limits.
Then there’s the audio output. Despite having side-mounted stereo speakers, the MacBook Neo’s audio output has quality volume – you can differentiate between the highs, lows and mids. The MacBook Air’s speaker setup is much better in comparison, but for a laptop costing Rs 70,000, this computer has a great pair of speakers. You can watch your Netflix shows without feeling the need to attach your Bluetooth speakers or your headphones.
Speaking of headphones, you get a 3.5mm audio jack for audio input/output. You also get two USB-C 2.0 ports for data transferring and charging. The lack of USB-A ports may push back users coming from Windows machines and their overdose of I/O ports, but for most people in an online-centric world, the Neo doesn’t pose an issue.
The webcam on the MacBook Neo is decent by Mac standards, but way better than anything Windows laptops offer at this price. Video quality looks sharper and with much better colour and texture rendition. The on-board mic does a great job at cutting down on background noise and making the voice feel rich.
Battery life beats all Windows alternatives
MacBooks have always stood with great battery life in the Apple M series chip era, and the Neo holds onto that legacy, even though it uses a weaker iPhone processor. In my office use case scenario, the MacBook Neo’s fully charged battery can easily last up to 10 hours before needing a quick top-up. That’s easily a whole-day battery life for most users – way better than your average Windows laptop’s 4-hour stamina.
You can leave the charger behind, although when needed, you can use your standard 20W iPhone charger (since that comes in the box as standard) to fill up the battery. Charging takes a while, though, as the laptop doesn’t support fast charging. You might need to wait for at least an hour for a 20-100% refill. There’s no MagSafe charging available here.
Verdict
The MacBook Neo is exactly the product that this market has been begging for years – an affordable laptop that doesn’t need to cheap out on basics. From the build quality to its display, its processing to the battery life, and even its speakers, the MacBook Neo simply dominates every other Windows laptop that you can buy for Rs 70,000, or more.
Who knew that using an old iPhone processor to power the most affordable MacBook could result in a reliable and well-built laptop? The MacBook Neo just showed all Windows-based brands how to make a good laptop in the affordable segment. There are some drawbacks to settle for the most affordable MacBook, but on the whole, the MacBook Neo is a great laptop to work on.
Hence, here is our verdict – buy the MacBook Neo if you can spend up to Rs 70,000 on a laptop, and you seek a quality non-professional workflow. It is ideal for most college students and young professionals, provided macOS can support your essential workflow apps.