The author tested the MacBook Neo for several specific tasks, including editing videos with Adobe Premiere Pro and editing episodes 974 of the Macworld Podcast and a couple of video shorts with its 8GB of RAM. The A18 Pro processor and 8GB RAM, which can't be upgraded at all, are underpowered compared to the other M5 models. However, author Sam Henri Gold found that the low-end chip and limited RAM were not an issue. He used these tasks to see if usability became problematic due to its low profile due to the lack of RAM and low availability. Despite these challenges, he found the Neo still felt capable under heavy loads and handled the "mess" better than he did. The only thing that slowed down was the export of the full podcast episode, which took 31 minutes longer than it took on the M5 Max MacBook Pro. The author also expressed concern about the potential impact of swap memory use on an SSD's lifespan, but never noticed a performance hit.