The Mac isn’t that bad of a gaming platform anymore. For the 2000s until the 2020s it was an afterthought. PC gaming ruled on Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and for all the Mac’s supremacy among video editors, graphical designers, and people who just wanted a clean, no-fuss computer, the Mac as a gaming platform was just something of a joke. Few games came to macOS, and those that did ran kind of poorly.

Apple has spent the past few years beefing up its gaming credentials, adding support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which PC gaming laptops had long supported. And so when Apple introduced the budget, $590 MacBook Neo in March 2026, everybody wanted to know how well it could game.

And the answer is: not particularly well. But if you want to stick with Apple, you have better options for a Mac gaming laptop.

juicier apples than the neo

All said and done, I’m not at all surprised that Digital Foundry found that the MacBook Neo struggled to play even games friendly to lower-spec devices, such as Death Stranding and Control, and was, in author William Judd’s words, made Cyberpunk 2077 “unplayable even on the lowest settings…”

The MacBook Neo is a $589 budget laptop. You can have only two of the three: “gaming,” “laptop,” and “cheap.” The MacBook Neo exists for those using their laptops for lightweight needs, such as writing Word documents, cruising the internet, and checking up on emails. As the cheapest MacBook that Apple has offered in decades, it makes sense that it wouldn’t prove to be much of a capable gaming platform.

Apple did something out of character when it launched MacBook Neo in March 2026. The MacBook Air, more of a mid-range laptop in features and price, had been the slightly lofty bar of entry into the Mac world for years and years, ever since Steve Jobs introduced that revolutionary aluminum unibody MacBook in 2006.

If you want a decent gaming MacBook, step up to the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 14″. Yeah, that’s not a typo. It’s just how Apple’s naming convention breaks down these days. It’s the mid-level chip (the M5 Pro, not the base level M5) available on the MacBook Pro, which is Apple’s top level of the MacBook. But hey, that’s double Pro.

It won’t play AAA titles at the highest graphics settings, but it has enough oomph to play them on decent quality, and lighter-weight games should have no program with the M5 Pro chip’s power and the 24 GB of RAM.

Oh, is that not enough for you? Well, la-dee-da, hardcore gamer. Check out the MacBook Pro M5 Max 16″. It’s not cheap, but it’s not out of line for what a capable gaming laptop costs these days, PC or not. The M5 Max chip is the high-performance chip offered on the MacBook Pro, and this 16.2-inch display version allows not just for more screen real estate, but also better cooling from its larger chassis compared to the 14.2-inch screen version, which translates to better performance under heavy and sustained gaming. With 48 GB of RAM and the latest version of Apple’s best in-house-designed chip, the M5 Max, it’ll tackle even the most demanding games on high quality graphics settings.

If you can’t stomach the idea of dropping more than $1,000 on a laptop right now but just want a MacBook that can play a few not-particularly performance-intensive games, the MacBook Air M5 is your best bet. I wouldn’t expect to be able to turn up the graphics quality all that high on an AAA game such as Cyberpunk 2077, but at least it’ll be able to play it.