The MacBook Neo’s 8GB of unified memory has been a major topic of conversation since Apple announced this new budget-friendly $599 laptop. And that makes sense, given how resource-heavy web pages have become, along with Chrome’s infamous high memory usage. If you’re the kind of student or digital nomad this laptop is aimed at, it’s natural to wonder if the Neo can handle your average workflow.
To that end, we decided to put the MacBook Neo through a stress test that simulates a typical day of use. While you might not ever have so many open tabs and apps running on the Neo, it’s interesting to see what Apple’s entry-level MacBook can and can’t handle. At what point will you hit a bottleneck?
Here, we opened Chrome tabs one by one, loading lighter and more demanding websites, and kept going until we started noticing slowdown. To make the test more demanding, we disabled Chrome’s memory saver feature. This is a RAM-saving feature I recommend enabling when using Chrome on the best laptops and best computers, but for this test, we wanted to see how well the Neo would perform without it.
Without spoiling the results, the MacBook Neo is more capable than you would expect from a machine with 8GB of RAM. You need to have a lot going on before you’ll feel the laptop buckling under the workload. Though capable, it’s important to remember that this is a budget machine, so don’t expect to render 4K videos or run other demanding apps without hitting constraints.
Are you worried about the 8GB RAM limit, or do you think it’s enough for the light work the MacBook Neo was designed for? Share your thoughts in the video and in the comments section below. Also, don’t forget to check out our separate gaming test featuring Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil 4 Remake on the Neo.
