MacBook Neo Real Day In The Life - Who's It Actually For?

All right, so first things first, morning routine. The coffee's brewing, I'm running the vacuum real quick, just getting an apartment right before I sit down. Nothing crazy, but once I'm settled in, this is where the Neo starts to show what it's about. I'm catching up on the market, scanning through the Yahoo Finance app on my 17 Pro Max, and I come across this article about Nvidia breaking into a bullish pattern. Now, here's the thing. I highlight that article using Universal Clipboard, pull it right over to Claude on the Neo, and I ask it to compare what this article is saying versus the actual technical charts that I've got running on the Trade Desk View macOS app. Side by side, no emailing myself links, no copying and pasting between Google Drive or Notes, it just works. And honestly, that right there is the real pitch for this machine. Before we even talk about whether the RAM is enough, before we get into the specs, the way this thing lives inside the Apple ecosystem and lets you move between devices like this is what's going to sell most people. It's not about raw power, it's about how effortless everything feels. Now, here's the wild part. In the first 20 to 30 minutes, I didn't experience any sort of battery drawdown. I actually had to double check because I thought something was a bit off. Nope, just great battery life. Performance-wise, no issues. Everything runs smooth, no lag, no hiccups, nothing that made me stop and think, oh, this can't handle that. And I do have tabs open in Safari. And I got to say, I love this citrus colorway. It's a fun change of pace for a laptop color. I've also enjoyed the typing experience on the MacBook Neo and find its lightweight, durable build really refreshing. I can be a bit more casual when holding my laptop, just with the whole nature of being on the go as a creator. So it's nice to know that this has a durable recycled aluminum enclosure. I can just pick it up and use it like a tablet. It just fits into how I've naturally moved around this morning. Thank you to Zapier for sponsoring this portion of today's video. This used to be the part of my day that ate the most hours. Sitting at the Neo, scrolling tech news, trying to find the stories worth covering. So I built something to do this for me. I use Zapier MCP to build Dispatch. And it lives inside Claude where I already work. When I asked Claude what's worth covering this morning, Zapier MCP connects it to my entire stack. Notion, Discord, and an RSS. And it pulls the hottest storylines into my workflow. This isn't a chatbot doing chatbot things. It's Claude with real reach, real triggers, real actions across 9,000 apps. The kind of setup that meets me where I already work instead of forcing me into another tool. Setting it up was super simple in four moves. One, a Notion database called Dispatch Inbox. Two, a private Discord channel for the alerts. Three, Zapier MCP connecting Claude to Notion and Discord. And four, an RSS that Claude can reach for the top stories. So mid-walk or when I'm first waking up, I can ask Claude what's hot in my Dispatch Inbox. Dispatch pulls a heat 5 story. I would have missed scrolling X or a news outlet for an hour. Now I can focus on building, responding to comments, and making better videos. Less scrolling, more shipping with Zapier. Now when it comes to visibility and the Mac Neo keyboard, it isn't backlit but I haven't any issues with visibility. The space is well lit so we'll see how I feel later on. But at least Apple added Color Match Scissor Switch Magic Keyboard with a comfortable and durable design for a laptop at this price. The version I'm using has Touch ID and 512 gigabytes of storage. So no real deal breakers when it comes to my first impressions of the keyboard. But coming from a pro, it doesn't feel as sturdy. You can feel the shallower key travel and the lighter chassis when you're typing. It's much more lightweight and you could say cheaper feeling than the M4 MacBook Pro keyboard that I'm used to using. But keep in mind we're talking about a laptop that's 1.6 of that price. So after jotting some notes down in my journal, a friend of mine hit me up in the group chat asking what is a good net worth at 30. And I'm not gonna lie, I don't know either. I turned 30 at the end of 2025 and that's something I've been thinking about too. So I just opened Safari right there, did some quick research, found some interesting stats and dropped it in our chat. Didn't pick up my phone once. That's the kind of thing that just happens naturally on this machine. You're already on it, a conversation comes in and you can handle it right there living in the macOS ecosystem. The first coffee shop was an L. I took an Uber. I never take an Uber. It wasn't that expensive. It's probably the cheapest Uber I ever taken in my life. It was $5. Shout out to Uber1. But it's this coffee shop. It's not even a coffee shop. It's technically a listening room that is a mixed-use building. So there's like a plant sanctuary, listening room, cafe, and restaurant. And they don't have the cafe hours online. So it always says they're closed or that they're not open until six. And then there's no way of knowing if they have an event. There's no number to call. So it's really a crapshoot. Whenever I go to that coffee shop, there's a high chance that they're doing an event like they were today. All right, so I just wrapped up my two-mile recovery run. And I wanted to keep the pace chill, keep it calm, nine minutes, 30 seconds per mile. And only two miles because I'm thinking about doing a HIROX workout later because I bought a pass for Solace, which if anybody's interested in HIIT workouts or specifically HIROX-focused workouts, which Solace Prime classes are, I bought this weekly pass. And I want to take advantage of it because in a week, it's going to expire. So I want to get as many HIROX classes. And especially since I'm coming off that really big trip to Manchester and China, technically Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, and Manchester. But right now, I need to make a protein shake. And I'm just going to apologize because you probably can see in the background that the place isn't... It's not that it's not organized, but it's a little junky. And that's because we're going to be moving in literally, what's today? 21 days to a new apartment in Brooklyn. So for most of the videos, there's just going to be boxes everywhere. I can't even say that this is an underrated part of the Magneto experience, but the colors that Apple dropped, so fun. And I think the citrus just looks really good everywhere. It's just sitting on the kitchen countertop and it just looks so good. And believe it or not, that's a big selling point for a lot of people. I think we're so used to these monochromatic colors for our laptops that Apple dropping indigo, citrus, that blush color, got people really excited. And sometimes all you need is a color change. And of course, $599 for the highest spec version is a good incentive. Once I got back to the office, I needed to upload some video files from my editor and clear out my inbox. Then I decided to see how easy it would be to use cloud co-work to build out an expense spreadsheet, tracking my Q1 expenses from screenshots I'd taken throughout the quarter. I absolutely need to be more proactive with quarterly tracking as a creator. Tracking income, paid partnership pipeline, expenses, so it doesn't all pile up at the end of the year. You probably notice how often I've been wearing the Sony WH-1000XM6s this past year. They've become my go-to over-ear headphones. The headband and ear cups are incredibly comfortable. The noise cancellation is top tier and they fit me better than any other noise cancellation headphones I've ever owned. Anyways, I knocked out the spreadsheet out in literally minutes. This operation was lightning fast with cloud. Being able to airdrop or simply pull the receipt files from my iCloud expense folder is another example of how Apple's spec sheets don't tell the full picture. Once you start using multiple devices together, iCloud, airdrop, universal clipboard, it really shows the power of the ecosystem. For a lot of people, this is the Mac they've been waiting for. It lives inside the Apple ecosystem, feels like a natural extension of your phone, and handles probably 80% of what the average person does on a laptop, all at the price of these nice pair of Sony XM6s. All right, so this is a real world use case of the Mac Neo. And like I mentioned earlier in the video, this isn't going to be from a pro user's perspective. There's no scope creep in terms of my day in a life. I'm just showing you all what I would typically do on a Thursday like today. Right now I'm installing Premiere Pro. I've got Safari that has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 tabs open. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 different desktops open. The only app that's really working right now is the Trading Desk View. And Claude is currently done processing the request that I had earlier. My spreadsheets are done. I'm looking at my Q1 expenses. So if you are using spreadsheets and doing some light photo and video editing, I also think that off initial impressions, this is more than enough power. I'm experiencing zero lag. That's with using the Claude chat to create expense spreadsheets for me from scratch, along with installing Premiere Pro and playing YouTube at the same time. Hi guys. We're back in the studio space and it's 7.02 PM. We've got 50% battery, which is pretty good. I mean, honestly, can't tell you that I expected to have a lot more battery. I've downloaded Creative Cloud, Premiere Pro, Trading Desk. I already had Claude installed. I downloaded Pliability app, which is a stretching app that I'm going to be using later today because I'm so sore from that Hirox workout. At the coffee shop, I didn't use any performance intensive applications at all. Mostly just browse Pinterest for suit ideas for my homie's wedding in a few weeks. Then I went to Google Photos on the Mac Neo because I wanted to have a bigger screen to scan through my videos from Manchester because we're going to be posting the S26 Ultra video tomorrow. There are a couple of videos that I wanted to include that were on the Samsung Galaxy, and I did have my Samsung Galaxy, but I was basically editing on the Galaxy and then using Google Photos on the Mac Neo, making decisions on which footage I want to include in the video. The main question that people seem to ask about the Mac Neo is if 8GB of RAM is enough because in 2026, 16GB seems to be the minimum that most expect from a laptop. But from my experience to date, 8GB has been plenty. I have done some video editing in CapCut last week, and I did notice that it was a bit slower than my MacBook Pro, but you're comparing a 32GB of RAM versus 8GB of RAM laptop, and also the MacBook Pro M4 Pro chip that I have is probably like four times the price of this Mac Neo. And like I said, for this video, I wanted to be more catered towards your average user, your average consumer. Definitely going to do a video editing test because I have to know what it's like to edit with Premiere Pro with this laptop. This is my first time ever doing this, so this experience is going to be brand new to me on camera. I've got some footage from China that I've been meaning to edit, and I'm not going to do any crazy edits. I'll add some text overlays, add a few effects here and there like warp stabilization, low pass filter, but they're not too demanding. Well, warp stabilizer can be demanding. So curious to see how the laptop holds up as we warp stabilize 4K log footage, 4K 10-bit log footage from my Sony A7IV. And then I'm going to add a LUT, add some music, keep it chill because that's how I edit my videos anyways. I don't do a ton of effects. And this is for the end of the S26 Ultra weekend live video. I will say one thing that is pretty annoying to me, and maybe most people don't care, but I would love to have my USB-C ports on both sides of the laptop because when I'm connecting my laptop to a monitor, I think it looks way cleaner when I'm able to plug my USB-C cable into my USB-C port on the right-hand side versus the left-hand side. Also, I prefer not to have a very long cable to just make my desk look a lot more organized and not having a bunch of spillover for my cables. But I digress. If you're wondering why I haven't connected this to my studio display, it's because I want to see what it's actually like using a 13 inch laptop because I never use anything smaller than 14 inches.