Apple's $599 MacBook Neo is showing a strong presence in the budget laptop market.

The Verge reported this on a podcast, focusing on the MacBook Neo’s performance and market reaction.

The Verge’s Nilay Patel (닐라이 파텔) and David Pierce (데이비드 피어스) bought a MacBook Neo and tested it. They said it delivers strong performance for its price and was built at a level existing PC makers would find hard to match. Some issues in macOS Tahoe were cited as a drawback.

The 13-inch MacBook Neo comes in 4 colours: silver, blushy, citrus and indigo. The base model has 256GB of storage. The higher-end model offers 512GB of storage and additional use of Touch ID.

The MacBook Neo uses the A18 Pro chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro. An analysis said its price could be kept low because it uses a lower-priced chip than the M5 chip used in the MacBook Air.

The Verge said Windows laptop makers are not ready to respond to Apple's push led by the MacBook Neo. Asus Chief Financial Officer Nick Wu (닉 우) acknowledged that the MacBook Neo "shocked the entire market" but played it down as a device for simple content consumption. The Verge said this repeats past mistakes of underestimating the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Neo offers enough performance for typical laptop use such as web browsing, document editing and streaming, The Verge said. The A18 Pro chip outperforms the $2,400 Asus Zenbook Duo in single-core benchmarks and handles everyday tasks smoothly despite the limitation of 8GB of RAM. The Verge said Windows laptop makers still tend to sacrifice quality in low-priced models.