The MacBook Neo is a great second computer
Before I go further let me just be clear. If the MacBook Neo is the Mac you can afford then it's a nice computer. You can build apps, edit video, and do effectively whatever you want on it. It's a Mac and that makes it immensely powerful no matter what processor is powering it.
One of the things I've been grappling with since the launch of this product is that Mac users who can easily afford and already use much higher-powered Macs were seemingly drawn to this computer. Hell, I was too! And yet as I stated plainly in my review, this is a budget computer. It is slower in every single metric, even in everyday tasks, than what we've considered the baseline in the Apple Silicon era.
And yet I'm writing this very post on it.
One of the things iPad users have talked about for years now is the idea that the iPad makes them focus in a way the Mac doesn't. The limitations of the iPad are actually a good thing in that they make them slow down and focus on one thing at a time. Writers in particular really love using the iPad for this reason. In a weird way this is what I like about the MacBook Neo as well.
Obviously it's a Mac that can multitask like crazy if I want it to but at the same time it's really not that fast and it gets overwhelmed if I try to do too much with it. As such it makes me slow down and focus on doing one or two things at a time. As a primary computer I don't particularly want this and I'm blessed to be able to afford a better computer (pun not intended) that doesn't make me do this, but as a secondary computer it is actually nice to have this sort of experience. I can do everything I want, but it's a pain once I get too much going, so it helps me focus on one thing at a time without feeling like I'm doing so because I can't do something.
This is all, not to mention that because of some of my work being based on large language models that run in the cloud, some of my work is not impacted by the reduction in power. It's gone now, but I was running Clawed Fable 5 on this machine briefly and it was just as good as running it on my much more powerful MacBook Pro.
