Apple MacBook Neo surprises in new benchmarks with Apple M3 surpassing performance
Apple will not begin shipping the MacBook Neo until March 11. Announced during an in-person event, the new 13-inch MacBook is already available to pre-order for $599 from third parties like Amazon after debuting on March 4. While we await the first independent reviews, Geekbench has provided some insights into the performance we can expect from Apple's first A18 Pro-powered laptop in CPU and GPU-heavy workloads.
On the one hand, GPU performance appears to be slightly ahead of the M1-powered MacBook Air that we reviewed in 2020. At the time, that device averaged 30,112 in the Geekbench 6.5 Metal benchmark. Meanwhile, the MacBook Neo returns 31,178 from the benchmarks that have been listed so far. That result comes up around 5.7% short of the iPhone 16 Pro Max despite containing 16.6% fewer GPU cores.
Likewise, multi-core CPU performance indicates that the MacBook Neo is marginally more powerful than the MacBook Air M1. On the other hand, a single-core average of 3,530 is almost 50% higher than the same MacBook at 2,363 points. Dispatching, Apple M2-powered MacBooks, the A18 Pro helps the MacBook Neo score around 12.7% more than even the actively-cooled MacBook Pro 14 M3. In fact, the MacBook Neo falls just behind Apple's M4 generation devices in single-core workloads. Please see our MacBook Neo launch article for more details about Apple's $599 MacBook.
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