The Ultimate Showdown: A18 Pro Takes on the M1 and M4 in a Battle of Performance

Apple’s most groundbreaking product of early 2026 isn’t a flagship powerhouse, but rather a modest entry-level MacBook that redefines what a budget laptop can do.

Unveiled last among a week that was filled with other product announcements, the MacBook Neo is remarkable not so much for its raw performance overall but for a tacit demonstration of how capable Apple’s iPhone silicon actually is.

That’s because it’s powered by an A18 Pro — essentially the same chip used in the 2024 iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max models, but with one less GPU. While that’s led some to dismiss the MacBook Neo as an expensive toy, let’s not forget that this chip’s predecessor, the A17 Pro, brought PS5-level AAA console games to the iPhone, including Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage — games that are well beyond the capabilities of the average $600 laptop.

The bottom line is that the A18 Pro chip is a serious powerhouse, and now the first MacBook Neo benchmarks have arrived to back this up.

Single-Core Speed That Rivals the M4

In terms of raw performance, Apple’s 2024 iPhone silicon compares very favorably to Apple’s M-series chips — and in single-core performance it can even hold its own against the M4 that was released that same year.

That last part isn’t surprising, as the A18 Pro and M4 were fabricated using the same 3-nanometer (3 nm) production process, and likely have identical performance cores; the M4 just has more of them, which lets it pull well ahead in multi-core performance.

Specifically, the A18 Pro has a six-core CPU made up of two performance cores and four efficiency cores, while the M4 has up to 10, four of which are performance cores.

That’s always been a “core” advantage of Apple’s M-series chips (pun only slightly intended), which is why the A18 Pro falls back into the earlier M1/M2 generation in multi-core performance.