hi... finally something I can shed some light on. I borrowed a Mac Neo today, purely out of curiosity as I was interested to see if this could be used as backup computer, or for temp helpers etc...
The answer is ... it can, to an extent. The Neo is actually fine handling a complex 29 model if you're just working on the laptop. I saw severe restrictions as soon as I hooked it up to an external screen. It just wouldn't offer a native resolution, so everything was slightly pixelated. (Studio Display 27, I usually run that at 3200x1800. the neo only offered 1920x1080/2560x1440 or 3840x2160. All options looked slightly off but not so bad that you couldn't work with it for a few hours.
Working itself in the AC model was actually totally fine. no delays, beach balls or any kind of errors.
At the end I decided to let it run a little rendering that I had previously used on my other machines. (not that we do that much anymore in the days of AI).
Anyway, on my M5Pro that image takes 4min31, on an older M2Pro the same image takes about 10minutes. On the Neo I killed it after 10 and it had done about 15% of the final pass.
In summary... It's not suitable as a proper daily workhorse (with a big screen), but... if you're travelling or just need to work on the laptop itself (I used an iPad as an external screen and that was perfectly fine) then it actually is an incredible bargain. especially as it runs on the latest OS...
