Apple making a “budget” laptop is the kind of headline that makes you check if Hell has frozen over yet, but here we are: I tested the cheapest MacBook ever, the MacBook Neo. On first impressions it’s still very Apple-y—metal build, one-hand opening, and it feels like a proper MacBook instead of a sad plastic compromise. But you immediately see where the corners got cut: two USB‑C ports, with the bottom one stuck at USB 2 speeds, meaning you’ve basically got one “fast” port and it’s not even Thunderbolt. The keycaps feel a bit weird, the trackpad is smaller, and the Wi‑Fi performance wasn’t great—Ethernet via the top USB 3 port helped a lot. The really unhinged part is what’s inside: an A18 Pro phone chip with 8GB unified memory and a 5‑core GPU. So I did the responsible thing and tried gaming—starting “real balls to the wall” with Cyberpunk. It ran at around 30 FPS with MetalFX on quality, and pushing settings around only helped a bit, with RAM clearly being a big limitation. Resident Evil also ran surprisingly okay, Dirt Rally hovered around 60 FPS once I turned off V‑Sync (though my controller triggers were being weird), and then I landed on the use case that actually makes sense: emulation. OpenEMU is easy, the UI is nice, and this little iPhone-in-a-laptop can chew through N64 and PS1 games at a solid 60 FPS. It’s not a gaming laptop, but as basic computing that doesn’t feel like a cheap piece of crap, it’s kind of a nightmare for budget Windows laptops.