How Well Does the MacBook Neo Perform?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.

Let's look at some real world performance tests of the MacBook Neo.

So I want to do a bunch of videos on the MacBook Neo, but in this one I'm going to focus just on performance.

And I'm not going to do any benchmarks.

Plenty of other people are going to post benchmarks.

I want to do real world tests.

I'm going to show you what it's like to be using apps on the MacBook Neo, and I'm going to show you what it's like to push the Neo to its limit.

So let's take a look at the Neo screen and let's start doing things and seeing how well it reacts.

And by the way, I'm using the 512 gigabyte version of the MacBook Neo here.

I expect the performance is the same between the two models as long as you still have some space left for memory swap on the drive.

So let's start off with something pretty basic, just a search in the finder.

I'm just gonna search for something here And you can see it works just as you would expect.

It comes up pretty quick.

It's rendering each icon here, 'cause it's the first time, so they're not even cached, but it works just as quick as you want.

I could search for different kinds of things, and they come up just fine.

So no problems at all here.

Same thing with Spotlight.

If I use the Spotlight menu to search instead, you could see it finds this file.

Let's search for a folder, and there it is.

I also wanted to search for finding a mail message, and I knew that I could find a mail message with that.

So there that is.

And also I wanted to search for other things.

Like here I know the word astronomy was in my notes a lot.

So I found those, no problem, pretty fast.

Now let's try numbers here.

Here's a pretty big number spreadsheet, 10,000 rows with random numbers in that third column.

And if I use the check mark there, it will recalculate all the random numbers and do some complex calculations.

And it does it with no problem, just about a second to calculate it all.

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So here's the photos app.

I've got a lot of photos here in my sample library, and I can flip through them really easily.

You can see the performance is really good.

These are mostly, at the end here, 60 megapixel photos from my Sony camera, and you can see it renders them really good pretty quickly.

I can zoom in here, quite frankly, it's faster than my Mac Studio in rendering the 60 megapixel photos.

So that looks really good, but going into an individual photo here, I could go in, take the 60 megapixel photo, edit it.

I could apply the auto enhance.

You'd see it does that in a second, Then I could adjust some of the other things here, like the color, for instance, or go into say levels and adjust the levels here for this.

I could try some filters as well.

So go into that and then with the filters, I can just choose one of these and you can tell it well and quickly it applies it to the entire photo there.

And then I could go to the cleanup tool, which is using AI there.

And this actually takes a second here.

I'm going to try to get this leaf out of the way.

And it takes a few seconds and it will vanish.

So a little bit slower than my Mac Studio, but not too bad at all.

So how about editing images? So I brought into Pixelmator Pro a bunch of images.

This first is a standard high resolution iPhone image.

You can see the pixel width and height in the left there under image layer.

I can go in and apply some filters and things to it so you can see how it performs.

This is a pano, so it's much bigger than a standard image there.

And you can see it handles that really well.

I go to one of those 60 megapixel photos here and try playing around with that.

I notice a tiny bit of lag here.

You can see how just zooming in kind of wasn't super smooth, but it does it.

It will zoom in and I'll apply these filters here.

I mean, there's just the tiniest maybe half a second lag there when I go to apply one.

There's a raw photo taken with my Sony camera, and you can see it handles that pretty well.

So that's a really large file there with a lot of detail, and then it's basically rendering it there, and I can enhance it using effects and everything here.

Let me try applying one of those.

You can see it apply it to that raw photo like that.

And if that's not big enough for you, then how about a 330 megapixel image here taken by a camera? It's not mine.

And you could see that it looks pretty good.

I can zoom in here and change things about that entire image right there.

And then I just wanted to test out doing layers and stuff.

So I have a regular image here, not too small, and I put a bunch of layers there, some text along a curve, a bunch of masking, some effects, shapes, all sorts of stuff.

And for this, it really handled it with no lag whatsoever.

And note, I have all of these open here at the same time.

So Pixelmator Pro's got all these documents open.

And of course, I'm doing screen recording through all of this, something which you wouldn't be doing.

I'm recording every pixel of the screen.

If I look here in Activity Monitor, you can see I haven't even exited the green there for memory swap.

If I start to use it now with Activity Monitor open, because that uses a bunch of memory itself, you could see I'm in the yellow.

So that's screen recording and all of these big photos open here in Pixelmator Pro.

And it handles it just fine.

And there's nothing wrong with being in the yellow here when you're dealing with all these big images.

Now, I wanted to see what happened if you didn't have Pixelmator Pro running and you launched it and it had all these documents open.

How long would it take to actually open all of these documents, and how would it affect memory pressure? And you could see the memory pressure there at the bottom, going into the red as it's opening up all those files that we just looked at.

And you could see Pixelmator Pro loading.

This is all in real time.

I haven't sped this up or anything.

So you're gonna see what this is like.

You wouldn't normally have all of these open, especially just on a budget laptop like this, but it still handles them.

It doesn't take that long.

And you could see after being in the red for a bit, while it opens them all, it goes back into the yellow and I'm able to go and resume what I was doing with all these images.

Okay, so if you don't work with graphics, you probably don't care about all of that, but browsing, what if you have a bunch of browser tabs open and they've got a lot of hefty websites? So you can see I've got a bunch of standard websites, website that's heavy on JavaScript there, some news websites with lots of media there.

These are all opening tabs.

Here is Google Docs, a lot of people use that, and that of course is a pretty heavy site there and Google Sheets.

That's that same spreadsheet with 10,000 rows.

And I could redo the calculations inside Google Sheets rather than numbers.

And that's all in the browser.

A lot of people have been asking about Canva.

And so I've got Canva here.

I've got a document open in Canva.

And you could see me just selecting things.

It's really fast and responsive, even with all of these browser tabs open.

There's YouTube there and other heavy websites like Reddit.

You could see there's lots of media going there on Reddit.

and there's the homepage for Twitch.

There's Google Maps with all this stuff and I can move around in that as well.

And look, there's Flight Radar, which has a ton of stuff going on on the screen.

All at the same time, I'm able to move around.

So I wanted to look at some audio stuff.

Here's GarageBand.

I'm gonna drag a bunch of stuff into GarageBand here and just speed this up.

So I'm just gonna drag a ton of tracks.

And once I built something pretty complex there, I'm going to just try playing it.

I didn't see any lag or any issues here this whole time working here in GarageBand.

I've got a MIDI track there, I've got a bunch of audio tracks, and then it plays just fine.

So this works really well.

And then here's Logic Pro, I just opened up one of the sample Logic Pro projects here and I'm able to move around in it, scrub back and forth.

I'm able to jump around, select some things, move them around, delete some things on the fly, And that seemed to work without much issue either.

I didn't see any delay.

And you could see Logic is putting it in yellow there in terms of memory pressure, but it's all just working fine.

All right, let's try some video.

I'm gonna take three very different video clips, drop them into a fresh iMovie project, and try using iMovie.

And you could see, I can scroll back and forth.

It seems to work nice and smoothly here.

Let's try doing some things with it, like adding transitions here, and then previewing those transitions.

And that all works kind of as expected.

It seems like the Neo can handle iMovie pretty well.

Let's make this a cutaway, and let's change it from a cutaway to a split screen.

And you can see it split screen, so it's rendering both videos at the same time, picture in picture.

Let's try dragging that picture in picture around, put it in another spot.

Let's try adding a title here over this video.

I'm more interested in how responsive it is, how easy it is to use iMovie here.

I'm not seeing any issues here.

You can see that works just fine.

Let's try changing the color here, having it do that.

Let's try applying one of the filters to it like that.

So yeah, seems to handle iMovie just fine.

And looking at Activity Monitor here, you can see it hit the red and then yellow briefly while I was doing all that, but mostly remained in the green.

Now let's try Final Cut Pro.

And with Final Cut Pro, I'm actually going to take these five videos and guess what? They are all ProRes video.

So really hefty big 4K ProRes video files.

And I put it in and I'm able to work in Final Cut Pro just fine.

Let's go ahead and export these and see how long it takes to export five ProRes videos all put together and it's going to be exported as 4K video.

So when it was all done, it took 8 minutes and 25 seconds to export.

Now let's think about running lots of apps.

I've got really no apps running except screen recording now.

but I'm going to launch Safari, Mail, Naps, Pixelmator Pro with all of those huge image files open.

I'm going to go down the line here, launch all the productivity apps, pages, that big numbers document is open there and numbers, going to open the app store there as well, and now you could see it lagging.

If you look, you could see that black window back there is Pixelmator Pro, and that's taken a while to load all those big images into each of those tabs there.

And you can see it's kind of frozen up on me now, but it's not completely frozen.

And you'll notice that Pixelmator Pro is going to eventually catch up and do all the things it needs to do to open up those files and get to like the layers in that one document.

And you can see now Pixelmator Pro kind of is finished back there and I can now get to iMovie, it looks like.

I'm gonna go and try to launch that in addition to what's already launched.

And yeah, so now that's launching like that.

And let's go ahead and also flip through these to see them all now that they're all launched and all running.

It was definitely laggy while I launched all of those.

No doubt about it.

And you can see it took a whole second to go to Pixelmator Pro with all those big files open.

So I pushed the Neo to the limit.

You could see the memory pressure there was in yellow.

Hit red a few times there like that.

And just hit red right now going, bringing up activity monitor like that.

So yeah, push this to the limit and you can see what you can kind of expect for performance when you do a lot of things at once.

Let's try that again.

The only difference is I've closed all the Pixelmator Pro documents except the one that had those layers in it.

So normal size image with a few layers, not those massive 60 megapixel and more ones there.

You could see how launching all these apps was much easier.

It was definitely Pixelmator Pro that was the memory hog, because I had all of those massive images, including that 330 megapixel one.

You can see I never hit red there.

It just went to yellow and it's just stayed in yellow.

So there you go.

The performance is what I expected, but probably better than what a lot of other people expected.

Given that it has an A18 Pro iPhone processor in it and it has only 8 gigs of memory, a lot of people would expect it not to be able to handle things like Final Cut Pro or even iMovie, things like Logic Pro, running lots of browser tabs and everything that I showed you.

And it definitely does slow down when you push it to its limit.

Having those 60 megapixel photos and a 330 megapixel photo all open in Pixelmator Pro definitely meant it was using a lot of the SSD as memory in order to handle that and you could see how it got slow.

And also, launching all those apps at the same time definitely affected responsiveness.

But at no time during all of this did it actually stop working.

It maybe just gave me a two second or 20 second, in one case, delay before I was able able to continue working.

So this is good news if you don't ever think you're gonna push it this hard or if you think you may push it this hard but only occasionally and you want to make sure it could at least handle it somewhat.

I'm going to look at other aspects of the MacBook video in videos to come.

Thanks for watching.