- AMD has a new marketing campaign criticizing the MacBook Neo
- The main argument is that the Neo fails as a gaming laptop.
- It’s a very confusing angle, since that’s not what MacBooks are about, and especially not the budget Neo.
AMD appears to be on the defensive about its Windows 11 laptops and the threat posed by Apple’s MacBook Neo.
Tom’s Hardware noted that AMD has a new marketing campaign that aims to take the Neo down a notch or two, promoting the benefits of Ryzen AI CPUs instead.
AMD insists that: “The competition made concessions. You don’t have to.” Then he adds that: “Everything MacBook Neo leaves out, integrated with AMD Ryzen AI processors.”
The main idea of the compromise message is that the MacBook Neo is not up to the task of gaming. AMD notes that 15 of the top 20 PC games do not run natively on a MacBook Neo and that “workarounds” (emulation) are needed to play them. The games are chosen by Team Red themselves, although it’s a fairly fair selection of esports classics and more modern efforts like Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Black Ops 7.
It’s not just about games, of course, but that’s the main theme here. AMD also notes that Windows 11 laptops with their Ryzen AI CPUs may have touch screens (which the MacBook Neo doesn’t have) and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Neo’s two USB-C connectors.
AMD then highlights the benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 220 against Apple’s A18 processor, as seen in the Neo, where both laptops have 8GB of RAM, but the Ryzen is up to 57% faster for multitasking and 38% faster for content creation, as measured in Blender and Cinebench, among others.
Analysis: confusion over commitments
This is really strange, because what a lot of confused people on Reddit have been saying (echoing my first thought) is: “I didn’t buy a Mac to play games. That’s not really what they’re for.”
Someone else in that thread agrees: “Okay, but no one buys a MacBook to play games, right?”
And another Redditor observes: “Imagine if ‘Macs don’t work’ was the best thing you got, lol. I’d fire my marketing team.”
These people, of course, are absolutely right. You don’t buy a MacBook for gaming, and you especially don’t buy a MacBook Neo for PC gaming. This is not just an Apple laptop, but a low-end one with a mobile chip designed entirely to be affordable (mostly for students) and capable of tackling everyday computing workloads, and that’s it.
Well, you might want to play around a little casually, but the MacBook Neo can handle it just fine. What you don’t want to do on a Neo is play the best PC games, unless you’re seriously mistaken, and well, some people probably fall into this category.
So why AMD has led with this gaming angle in its Ryzen AI laptop marketing, compared to its MacBook Neo marketing, is really a mystery. Still, it’s not like the kind of Windows 11 laptops AMD uses as a comparison to the Neo, in a similar price range, can run those top PC games as well.
Of course, AMD has chosen its ‘best games’ very carefully, which is evident. But still, the integrated Radeon 760M graphics (used in the benchmark) can’t come close to running some of these games with any kind of fluidity, even at low details (at the Full HD resolution at which the tests were run).
The same selection applies to productivity and creativity benchmarks, and the thing about the MacBook Neo is that, as we’ve seen at TechRadar, despite only having 8GB of RAM, it runs smoothly and responsively through everyday tasks. That’s not something you can always say about a Windows 11 laptop with 8GB of RAM in the same price range.
Of course, Microsoft is busy working to improve Windows 11 with lower RAM loads, but Apple isn’t sitting still either, delivering a big performance boost with the recently released beta version of macOS 27.
AMD should have put more thought into the positioning of this marketing piece, especially considering that it’s the Neo that the company is going for. The truth is, when it comes to gaming, you shouldn’t expect much from any budget laptop, even if what you get from a Windows 11 machine is obviously a better deal, thanks to the aforementioned gaming compatibility without the need for emulation tricks.
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