MKBHD doesn't throw around phrases like "most disruptive product in 10 years" casually. He's reviewed the iPhone X, the Vision Pro, M1 MacBook Airs, and everything in between. So when Marques Brownlee — one of the most-watched tech reviewers on YouTube — drops a week-long review of Apple's new $599 MacBook Neo and opens with that sentence, you sit up and pay attention [1]. The thing is, he's not talking about new technology. The MacBook Neo has nothing in it that didn't already exist. It's running an iPhone chip. The display is a 60Hz LCD. There are two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. The battery is smaller than a MacBook Air's. Apple literally cut costs everywhere visible. And MKBHD's conclusion is: that's exactly the point. The MacBook Neo doesn't need to be revolutionary. It just needs to be good enough to make every other laptop in its price class look bad by comparison.
The A18 Pro Math Doesn't Lie
Here's the technical core of why this laptop is a bigger deal than it sounds. The A18 Pro chip from the iPhone 16 Pro posts Geekbench multi-core scores over 8,500 — essentially matching M1 MacBook Air performance. On single-core, it's actually closer to M3. Metal and OpenCL GPU benchmarks land at M1 territory too [1]. For context: you could buy an M1 MacBook Air from Costco or Amazon refurbished for around $600 for the past couple of years. Now Apple's selling a brand-new machine with that same performance envelope, a full aluminum chassis, macOS Sequoia, and a 1080p webcam — at $599 retail, $499 with a student discount. As a former developer, the benchmarks don't surprise me. What surprises me is the supply chain play behind them. Apple has been manufacturing iPhone chips by the tens of millions every year. They've already amortized the R&D, already driven the unit cost into the floor. Throwing an A18 Pro into a Mac isn't a stretch — it's basically a free optimization. MKBHD made the point bluntly: Apple needed a chip to run the webcam and speakers in their new Studio Display, so they dropped an A19 Pro in there. A chip that has 12 gigs of RAM — more than the MacBook Neo itself. That's how casually Apple prints these things [1].




