Let’s be real: the numbers just dropped and they’re genuinely embarrassing for Intel and AMD. Apple’s MacBook Neo, powered by an A18 Pro chip, scores 147 points in Cinebench 2024’s single-core test, beating AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X at 139 points and Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX at 135 points. A laptop that costs $599 full retail. A processor originally designed for iPhones.
Here’s what makes this genuinely weird: the MacBook Neo uses the A18 Pro chip, the same processor in the iPhone 16 Pro, which Apple released in 2024. This isn’t even the company’s latest phone chip. The A19 Pro on the latest iPhone 17 Pro is even faster. The company decided to put last year’s flagship phone processor in a budget laptop and somehow it still beats the latest and greatest from x86 makers.
To understand why this matters, you need to know what single-core performance actually does. Single-core speeds are important for activities like web browsing, using document apps, and streaming video. These are the actual tasks most people do on laptops. The MacBook Neo isn’t really built for video editing, music creation, 3D modeling, and similar tasks where multi-core performance makes more of a difference. That limitation matters, but it doesn’t erase the fundamental achievement: Apple’s phone architecture has caught up to and surpassed a decade of x86 evolution.
The engineering story is interesting too. The A18 Pro is closely related to Apple’s M4 chip with the same Performance and Efficiency cores, just fewer of them with a lower power budget and clock speeds. The M4 has four P and six E cores, while the A18 Pro has just two P cores and four E cores. Same architecture, less silicon. That’s efficiency.
Starting at $599, this is the cheapest MacBook that Apple has ever released. The budget constraints are real: it features 8GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, and a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID support. Some reviewers argue that 8GB of RAM will feel tight for multitasking, and they’re not wrong. But most people doing light creative work and everyday productivity won’t hit that ceiling.
The counterargument worth taking seriously is straightforward: this machine isn’t for power users. If you need sustained multi-core performance, the MacBook Neo isn’t built for video editing, music creation, 3D modeling, and the company’s low-cost MacBook focuses on competing with similar-priced Windows PCs and Chromebooks. You should buy a MacBook Air or Pro. That’s honest advice, and Apple actually gives it.
The broader story is about convergence. Apple’s M-series chips were vastly superior to x86 from the start with better performance-per-watt, better performance period, and the innovative unified memory architecture, but people figured the premium price made sense only for professionals. The MacBook Neo blows that assumption apart. You can now get exceptional single-core performance at the entry level. And you cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600-700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric, including performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality.
For Australian buyers, pricing will matter. The education discount Apple offers elsewhere typically comes to local markets too, though Australian pricing often carries a hefty tax. If you’re a student or teacher doing word processing, spreadsheets, browsing, or light creative work, the value proposition is hard to beat. If you’re a software engineer, video editor, or data analyst, you need more cores and more RAM. That’s not failure; that’s honest product segmentation.
The real story here isn’t just that Apple beat Intel and AMD in a benchmark. It’s that the gap between “mobile” and “professional” processors has effectively vanished. Apple saw that its A-series architecture had matured enough to power a full laptop at an aggressive price. The x86 industry is still selling the same architecture it’s sold for decades, with incremental improvements each year. That’s not a strategy. That’s inertia.