The first benchmarks for the MacBook Neo just showed up, and it's rather impressive

(Credit: Apple)

• 🔧 The first benchmarks for Apple’s new MacBook Neo have surfaced

• 📱 The low-cost MacBook’s performance is close to the iPhone 16 Pro

• 🤷‍♂️ This is unsurprising as both devices use the same A18 Pro chip

• 💰 The MacBook Neo starts at $599, and launches next week on March 11

Apple’s MacBook Neo launches next week, and we’ve finally got our first marker of its performance with some new Geekbench benchmark scores.

The new low-cost MacBook uses the same six-core A18 Pro chip you’ll find in the iPhone 16 Pro, albeit with one fewer CPU core, and unsurprisingly, the benchmark results this new MacBook achieved were remarkably similar.

As spotted by MacRumors, the MacBook Neo garnered a single-core score of 3461, plus a multi-core of 8668. In the GPU-focused Metal test, it achieved a score of 31,286.

For context, the single-core scores are similar to the M3 or M4 MacBook Air, pulling ahead of the M1 MacBook Air by a significant margin. This should mean general navigation of the OS, web browsing, streaming video, and such will feel as zippy as on more modern Mac hardware.

It’s in the multi-threaded loads where this device falls behind the newer Apple Silicon MacBooks, with a score that’s in and around the M1 MacBook. This means it may struggle with more intensive tasks that need all the cores working, such as video transcoding, music creation or gaming.

For reference, Apple doesn’t directly compare the performance of the MacBook Neo with other Apple products, hence the marketing material says the A18 Pro inside is up to 50 percent faster than a PC with a new Intel Core Ultra 5 processor for “everyday tasks”. It also says that it’s 3x faster for on-device AI workloads and 2x faster for photo editing.

Of course, it’s unclear as to how the device will actually perform until it gets into the hands of reviewers who will likely put it through more strenuous benchmarking than just Geekbench.

The device is priced at $599 for the 256GB model without Touch ID, rising to $699 for double the storage and Touch ID, and launches on March 11.

Up next: Apple MacBook Neo price comes with a nasty surprise in the EU and UK

Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.