Anyone daft enough to buy the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple’s MacBook Neo for gaming is about to meet reality.
AMD has rolled up with a shovel and started burying Job’s Mob’s budget laptop, claiming it cannot run most top PC games natively.
In a promo called “Unleash Your Potential with Ryzen AI Processors”, AMD tested 20 popular PC games and said the MacBook Neo could run only five of them natively.
A cheap Windows laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 220, meanwhile, could run all 20, which is rather embarrassing for the shiny aluminium crowd.
Under the headline “The Competition Made Compromises. You Don’t Have To”, AMD went straight for the gaming throat.
“While 15 of the top 20 PC games do not run on Macbook Neo natively, AMD systems give you access to massive game libraries across Steam, Epic Games Store, and PC Game Pass.”
AMD did not publish the full list, but its screenshot showed Hollow Knight: Silksong, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Dune Awakening, Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Elden Ring Nightreign, Civ 7, Arc Raiders, Borderlands 4, Schedule 1 and Battlefield 6.
That is an odd selection if AMD is trying to prove popularity, but it is still a decent pile of games Job’s Mob’s toy laptop cannot handle properly.
To be fair, the MacBook Neo never looked like a gaming machine. It is an ultra-budget laptop built around a mobile phone processor and designed for battery life while doing basic jobs.
That is fine if you want to browse, type and admire the logo. It is less fine if you expect the thing to behave like a PC.
Cloud gaming through Nvidia GeForce Now is an option, but that rather proves AMD’s point. You are outsourcing the gaming because the local hardware is not up to it.
AMD’s comparison machine is the HP OmniBook X Flip with a Ryzen 5 220, currently listed at $689.99.
That is more than the $599 MacBook Neo, but not by enough to rescue Job’s Mob from the comparison, especially as the HP is a convertible laptop with a touchscreen.
The Ryzen 5 220 includes a Radeon 740M GPU, so nobody should pretend this is a portable monster.
It is roughly a third of the power of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip used in the Asus ROG Ally X, meaning users might see about 70fps in CS2 at 1080p on low settings.
Modern games are more likely to sit around 10 to 20fps at low 1080p settings, which is grim, but at least they run.
AMD claims the HP has more SSD storage, with 512GB against 256GB, up to 57 per cent better multitasking, 38 per cent faster content creation and twice the Wi-Fi speed.
