What the hell was Apple thinking by powering the new MacBook Neo with a chipset from a previous generation iPhone?

What the hell was Apple thinking by powering the new MacBook Neo with a chipset from a previous generation iPhone? Well, to try and find out, I actually went out and spent my own money on the best Windows laptop I could find for the same price as the MacBook Neo. And to sum up my conclusion, holy shit. But first, let's talk about the MacBook Neo because this is Apple's most affordable MacBook they have ever released. It's powered by a variant of the A18 Pro chip, which is the same one found in the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and the base model starts at $600 US or $500 with an education discount. And for that, you're getting a 256 gigabyte SSD and 8 gigabytes of unified memory. And before you leave a long, rambling comment about the performance and the RAM, don't worry because we're definitely getting to that. Apple entering the more affordable end of the laptop market is actually kind of insane because despite the fact that this is more of a budget-centric MacBook, this offers the entire MacBook experience with basically no compromise, which from a value perspective is essentially a 10 out of 10. If you're shopping for a brand new laptop in the 5 to 600 US dollar price bracket, you're generally going to find one of three things. Either a premium Chromebook, which to me sounds like a freaking oxymoron, a newly released Windows laptop, which is borderline e-waste now but is going to be almost useless in terms of specs just a couple of years down the line, or the third option, which I personally think is the most sensible out of the three alternatives, because this Windows laptop came out about two years ago, but at the time cost a 1000 US dollars, but now is actually discounted to around 600, which I think puts this in the best position to go up against the MacBook Neo of the same price. Okay, so starting off with CPU performance, the MacBook Neo is in fact faster in both single core and multi-core compared to the equivalent Windows laptop of the same price. And for GPU performance, the MacBook Neo is yet again more powerful, which is kind of crazy because if there's a game you play and it's available on the Mac and it's a bit of a lighter title, it's going to run better on the MacBook Neo compared to the Windows laptop, which I personally think is kind of crazy. All the rhetoric I've seen online about the power of the MacBook Neo was, oh, it's just powered by an iPhone chip. How could it possibly be any good? Well, it's very good. And before you accuse me of any funny business, the Windows laptop I chose which came out in 2024, actually has Intel's version of what was then their answer to Apple Silicon's chips because this is running the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which at the time was reviewed as a really strong chip in a Windows laptop. But somehow it's beaten by an iPhone chip that came out in the same year because that's when the 16 Pro Max came out as well, and to me that is absolutely wild. And what's also very important to note is that the Windows laptop was basically crying at me with fan noise while running the test. It's fans got super loud, and the battery life just isn't as good as the MacBook's, which again is one of the strong suits of Apple using a phone chip in the MacBook because it can be fan-less, run completely silent, and the battery life is over twice as good as basically any Windows laptop at that price point. I'll just finish this segment of the video by saying this, because running at full performance, the A18 Pro chipset in the MacBook Neo actually draws less power than the Intel chip in the Windows laptop, idling and doing essentially nothing. That's the power of using an iPhone chip in a MacBook at this price point that also happens to be more powerful as well. And in terms of the rest of the laptop experience, the MacBook Neo feels amazing because just like every other more expensive MacBook, it's built out of a full aluminum unibody with a really thin and light design. And the display, while slightly smaller, owing to a more portable design, is much higher resolution, much brighter, and also more color accurate as well. The 1080p webcam, the microphones, the dual side-firing spatial audio speakers and the trackpad are leagues better than any Windows laptop at this price point. And the MacBook Neo doesn't even get slightly warm to the touch even when you're pushing the chip to the absolute max because that's the magic of using an iPhone chip in a much more thermally conductive enclosure like the aluminum on the MacBook Neo. Now, there certainly are some compromises you have to make for that $600 MacBook price point. The first one is that there's no backlit keyboard, which I personally find is a bit annoying in darker environments. And there are only two USB-C ports which both, while support charging, only one of them has the fast USB 3 port and the other one is slow USB 2. But to be completely honest, if you're not really plugging things into your Mac and you're only using the ports for charging, this personally to me isn't the biggest issue. To end off the video, let's quickly discuss the whole RAM thing because yes, this only has 8 gigabytes of RAM. Now, in Apple's defense, this is unified memory, so it's much faster, more reliable, and has much more optimization compared to 8 gigs of RAM on a Windows machine at the same price point. But the Windows machine that I found for the same price point has 16 gigs of RAM, which is definitely an upside to that machine. However, if you are buying a machine at this price point to do basic tasks, 8 gigabytes of RAM is going to be completely fine because for schoolwork or for general home use, this MacBook is going to absolutely fly and give you the best experience you possibly can overall for this price point. But to be completely honest, if you know what the concept of RAM even means, you're better off buying the more expensive MacBook Air because it's going to be more powerful and deliver better performance for more power-hungry tasks. But for general use, the MacBook Neo basically feels just like a MacBook Air because it's just as snappy, feels just as nice to use, and overall, it's really easy to recommend for just general basic use, and it completely demolishes the Windows competition at the same price point.