It does seem still very impressive against other top laptop CPUs.

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notebookcheck.net/Ryzen-AI-9-HX-PRO-375-vs-Ultra-…

Although I heard from Jeff Geerling’s review that the neo often noticably throttles after a few seconds.

It also has pretty terrible IO.

I think the biggest attraction is the build quality, screen, etc. Most cheap laptops seem to cheap out on those a lot in my experience, and Apple did not. If you’re not stressing the CPU or GPU, it’ll still feel almost as high quality as any other MacBook.