Is the new MacBook Neo powerful enough to be used for music production? That’s the question that’s been on the minds of bargain-hunting beatmakers since this $/£599 laptop was announced earlier this month, and with the machine now in the hands of customers, we’re starting to get some answers.
The headline is that, yes, you can indeed run music software on the MacBook Neo, and if your processor and RAM demands aren’t particularly intense, you should be able to do so pretty successfully.
Producer L Dre is one of several YouTubers who have been taking the machine for a spin. In his video, we see him firing up Ableton Live and making a beat using multiple instances of Arturia’s Analog Lab plugin.
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“Who would have thought we'd be having full Ableton running on an iPhone chip? That's kind of crazy,” he says, as he layers up the synths. In fact, he manages to get at least 14 tracks running with no issues, and there are more than 20 Analog Labs doing their thing before the machine metaphorically falls over.
Given that the MacBook Neo does indeed contain an ‘iPhone chip’ – the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max – and contains just a potentially limiting 8GB of RAM, that’s pretty impressive.
How does the machine fare when running Apple’s own Logic Pro DAW, though? I’m a Music Mogul has been testing that particular combination, running a variety of the software’s more power-hungry features and then stacking up the tracks to find out where it tops out.
Unsurprisingly, the Mastering Assistant, Stem Splitter and Chord analysis features all took longer to do their thing on the Neo than the M5 Pro MacBook Pro that was being used for comparison purposes – significantly longer in the case of Stem Splitter – but they got there in the end. The difference in session export times, meanwhile, was negligible.
But what of those maximum track counts? Impressively, the MacBook Neo managed to play back around 150 tracks of audio and MIDI without falling over. That’s significantly fewer than the 920 that the M5 Pro laptop could deal with, but it’s worth asking yourself how many tracks you actually need?
The MacBook Neo’s limitations did become a little more apparent when running a multi-gigabyte Kontakt sampler instrument – around 20 of these could be stacked up, compared to 170 on the M5 Pro – and the processor-intensive Serum 2 soft synth plugin also pushed the budget laptop’s capabilities. It still managed to run 30 instances of the same preset while playing back a MIDI file, though, which will be more than enough for a lot of people.
In fact, the bottom line appears to be that, if you want an affordable laptop to start making music on, the MacBook Neo is going to do you just fine. Yes, it’s nowhere near as powerful as a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro processor but, as I’m a Music Mogul points out, he’s been comparing a $5k laptop to a $599 one, so what did you expect?
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