Apple’s newly announced MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro, but it isn’t exactly the same chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Apple appears to be using chip-binning for the MacBook Neo, equipping it with a 5-core GPU, while the iPhone 16 Pro lineup gets a 6-core GPU. On paper, that sounds like the Mac version should take a noticeable hit in graphics performance. A fresh benchmark leak suggests the real-world gap is far smaller than you might expect.
A MacBook Neo listed under the identifier Mac17,5 has surfaced in Geekbench 6, offering an early look at CPU and GPU performance. The results show the MacBook Neo essentially matches the iPhone 16 Pro Max in single-core performance, edges ahead slightly in multi-core, and trails by a modest amount in the GPU-focused Metal test.
Here’s how the numbers compare.
MacBook Neo (A18 Pro with 5-core GPU)
Single-core: 3,450
Multi-core: 8,702
Metal (GPU): 31,286
iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 Pro with 6-core GPU)
Single-core: 3,445
Multi-core: 8,476
Metal (GPU): 33,030
The headline takeaway is the GPU difference: despite losing a GPU core, the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro is only about 5.6 percent slower than the iPhone 16 Pro Max in the Metal benchmark. That’s a surprisingly small drop for a binned chip and suggests Apple’s 5-core configuration is still delivering strong graphics performance for the price.
On the CPU side, things are even closer. Single-core scores are virtually identical, and the MacBook Neo posts a small multi-core advantage of roughly 2.7 percent. Benchmarks like Geekbench 6 won’t capture every aspect of real-world performance—especially sustained workloads and app-specific behavior—but they do provide a useful snapshot of what buyers can generally expect day-to-day.
As for availability and pricing, the MacBook Neo is listed starting at $599 with 256GB of storage, while a 512GB configuration starts at $699. Apple’s new entry-level Mac is expected to begin shipping on March 11.
