Facepalm: Few Apple devices have won as much praise as the MacBook Neo. Cupertino’s excellent budget laptop outsold the MacBook Air and Pro during its first three weeks, and it seems AMD is feeling a little jealous of all the attention. Team Red has just posted ads for its Ryzen laptops boasting of their gaming abilities, while also pointing out that the MacBook Neo can only play five out of twenty top PC games natively.
Like other companies, AMD likely feels a little threatened by the success of a budget MacBook, so it’s gone after its weakest area: PC gaming.
In its Ryzen AI processors ad, AMD compares an HP OmniBook X Flip, which features last year’s Zen 4-based Ryzen 5 220, against the Neo, which uses Apple’s A18 Pro chip. The company writes that the x86 machine offers access to game libraries across Steam, Epic, and PC Game Pass, complete with “high frame rates” and “advanced graphics,” and with “No workarounds required”
The ad also notes that just five of the “top 20” PC games run natively on the Neo. There are also stats about the HP laptop’s 512GB of storage (compared to the Neo’s 256GB), 2-in-1 touchscreen design, and extra ports. AMD adds that the Ryzen offers 57% better multitasking, 38% faster content creation, and up to double the WiFi speed.
While there’s no arguing that the OmniBook X Flip, which starts at $999, has plenty of elements that put it above the MacBook Neo, nobody is buying one of Apple’s machines to primarily play PC games, so it’s a strange comparison to make. It’s more like AMD is simply comparing operating systems, making points that will be obvious to most people.
Moreover, claiming the Radeon 740M GPU in the Ryzen 5 220 offers high frame rates and advanced graphics is quite a stretch – only the most forgiving games are playable, and even then, they have to set at their lowest 1080p settings. Meanwhile, the Neo has been shown to play some PC games quite well, given its hardware limitations.
The MacBook Neo is the clear budget-category winner in our Best Laptops feature. It sold 1.1 million units in under a month after launch thanks to its $599 starting price, design, and macOS experience. It’s an excellent laptop for the price, but not much good for PC gaming, obviously.