The MacBook Neo shows why the Apple fan obsession with benchmarks for 5+ years has been…weird

Oliver Haslam: MacBook Neo review, two months later: Almost a MacBook Pro beater

The MacBook Neo is a marvel. The fact that Apple was able to find a way to sell this thing for less than $600 makes it a laptop that's impossible not to recommend. It replaces the MacBook Air as the Mac most people should buy. Its 13-inch display isn't the best in a Mac, but it's better than almost anything at its price point.

There are sassier versions of this post that I could write, but I’ll do a generous one instead. I hope the MacBook Neo makes more Apple fans realize that while the insanely fast RAM, SSD, and general processing that Apple silicon Macs have had are nice, they are not essential for delivering a great computing experience.

Apple users have been in their “this bar chart shows how much better my computer is than yours” era for a while now, and it’s always been disconcerting as an Apple fan who remembers decades where Apple wasn’t winning the spec wars and Apple fans looked down on those who tried to argue their computer was better by citing benchmarks.

To me, it’s plainly obvious how much better a higher end Mac is for me, but clearly there are a good number of people out there who can’t seem to have much if any of an experience difference on this much slower computer.