Despite having only been released recently, there’s already an amazing Amazon Prime Day deal on the MacBook Neo. It’s down to just $549 in the Prime Day sale, which is spectacular value considering the performance it offers as a laptop for music production.
I recently gave it a solid four stars out of five in my MacBook Neo review for MusicRadar, and it genuinely surprised me with how ably it performs for music-making tasks, far outstripping what I expected for what is a budget Apple laptop in relative terms.
For me, the key takeaway from reviewing the Neo was that Apple machines are so powerful now that they needed to create a lower tier that is affordable for more people. Today’s MacBook Air M5 is as powerful as yesterday’s MacBook Pro, and thus, the MacBook Neo was born. It uses the same chip that’s found in the top-of-the-line iPhone 16, but that doesn’t mean it’s a slow coach.
From the moment I switched it on, I found the performance to be just as slick as that of my MacBook Pro M3, with it responding keenly to installing plugins, my DAW, and dragging over all my audio files from my external hard drive. I began using it with Logic, dragging in a shedload of audio tracks from a session I recently tracked at Spirit Studios with Josh from Squid Audio, and began by organising my tracks and adding in myriad busses to ensure that the session was neatly organised.
I then set about my usual mixing process, using oodles of spectral EQ, multi-band compression, de-noising treatments, and plenty of multi-band saturation to get the mix where I needed it to be. The MacBook Neo didn’t blink once in this entire process. From start to finished product, there was nary a hiccup in the entire process, which I have to admit was a complete surprise. Once I was done, with over 90 tracks and something in the region of 50 plugin instances, I was able to play back the entire track using the onboard audio driver at the lowest buffer setting, without any errors.
Now there are a few caveats here. First of all, I was using Logic, which is very well integrated into the Apple ecosystem, so it performs better than something like Pro Tools or Cubase does. Second, I only used stock plugins for the test so it can be recreated across multiple machines, which again are well-honed to ensure they perform at the optimum in Logic. This doesn’t mean it’d be rubbish with another DAW, just that the results you get might not be exactly the same as what I got. Also, if you’re using virtual instruments, then I imagine the track count would be a lot lower, as these are far more CPU-intensive.
I still think that the MacBook Neo is the best budget laptop for music production available right now, and with the extra £50 discount in the Prime Day sale, absolutely worth picking up if you need a machine that performs well without having to spend loads. In my experience, it massively outperforms Windows laptops at the same price, and for the student music producer or budding singer-songwriter, it’s a brilliant laptop to start your music-making journey on.
All the best places to shop at Amazon
- Amazon: All the best instrument deals
- Thomann: Up to 60% off Music Days sale
- Positive Grid: Huge 38% off Spark Summer Sale
- Guitar Tricks: 1 month of lessons for only $1
- Universal Audio: Up to 80% off half year sale
- Plugin Boutique: Bag loads of free software
- Waves: 200 plugins down to only $34.99
