[yreg]

Neo isn't much better than M1.

[wang_li]

In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. E.g. calculating 200x200, 1000 max iterations Mandelbrot fractals it does ~785 in ten seconds compared to ~760 on the M4s and somewhere in the 600s for the M1.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.

[windowsrookie]

I'm not really sure why your neo is performing better than the M4.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

[wang_li]

Yes, all the M-series have more cores, they often have better thermal management, and they have more memory bandwidth. (The the Neo still has crazy high bandwidth.) But, for a single threaded, strictly compute task that runs in 10 seconds, it outperforms the M4 cores. I don't know why, I'm just sharing my experience.

The actual code I am using for this is:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tp, void *tzp);

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      double xmin, xmax;
      double ymin, ymax;
      double x, y, xs, ys;
      int max_iter;
      int i, px, py;
      int width, height;
      volatile double wx, wy, t;
      double start, now;
      struct timeval tv;
      int count;

      xmin = -2.0;
      ymin = -1.5;
      xmax = 1.0;
      ymax = 1.5;

      max_iter = 1000;
      width = 200;
      height = 200;

      xs = (xmax - xmin) / (double) width;
      ys = (ymax - ymin) / (double) height;

      gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
      start = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
      count = 0;
      now = start;
      while (now - start < 10.0 /* && count == 0 */) {
        for (y=ymin, py = 0; py < height; py++, y += ys) {
          for (x=xmin, px = 0; px < width; px++, x += xs) {
            wx = 0.0;
            wy = 0.0;
            for (i=0; i < max_iter && (wx * wx + wy * wy) < 4; i++) {
              t = wx * wx - wy * wy + x;
              wy = 2 * wx * wy + y;
              wx = t;
            }
          }
        }
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        now = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
        count ++;
      }
      printf("%d iterations in %.2f seconds.\n", count, now - start);
    }

[kalleboo]

M1 is even better in some ways, like it has Thunderbolt ports (plural even!).

[Marsymars]

The only place where it seems unequivocally better for mainstream use is hardware AV1 decode.

(If I were building a Jellyfin server today, I'd probably use a MacBook Neo.)