MacBook Neo, the Benchmarks

https://birchtree.me/blog/macbook-neo-the-benchmarks/

Comments

sibtain1997Mar 27, 2026, 12:09 PM
Good read. I get the point about real world usage, but I still feel like Neo might fall short with how fast things are getting heavier, especially with Node and modern dev workflows.

Feels fine today, but not sure how well it holds up a couple years down the line.

raw_anon_1111Mar 27, 2026, 12:13 PM
You know A) most people aren’t doing “dev workflows” and B) Apple sells other computers?
sibtain1997Mar 27, 2026, 6:55 PM
Sure. Was talking about my use case. Probably should've been clearer.
chocochunksMar 27, 2026, 11:19 AM
> "What I will say is that in recent years, Apple has really accelerated the performance of their SSDs. And this has been a key part of the argument as to why PCs are absolute trash."

Umm, for the past 5+ years or so PC SSDs have have generally been as fast or faster than what Apple has been shipping. When Apple moved to NVMe they did so before the PC industry for the most part and had some advantage but they got eclipsed.

raw_anon_1111Mar 27, 2026, 2:20 PM
In $600 PCs?
chocochunksMar 27, 2026, 2:58 PM
Yes, even in $600 PCs. The SSD in the Neo is not particularly good either. Here's an example, a 649€ laptop:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Slim-5-15-lapto...

6200 MB/s Read, 4300 MB/s Write

vs the 699€ Macbook Neo:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Neo-Review-Surpr...

1550 MB/s Read, 1500 MB/s Write

The Neo is well below the class average.

saltcuredMar 27, 2026, 7:14 PM
Not knowing these devices personally, I'll just say I find most of these sorts of SSD performance summaries completely useless.

Too often, specs or even shallow benchmarks report little more than some theoretical peak speed from system to SSD controller RAM buffers, without any real information about reads or writes that actually go all the way to the solid state storage cells. And even when they do go all the way, they fail to really highlight performance variance for different realistic workloads...

ymolodtsovMar 27, 2026, 10:41 AM
Matt has some of the best content on MacBook Neo, enjoyed reading it.