4 MacBook Neo productivity apps you need to try right now

This week, Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptop’s starting cost of just $599—a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer.

Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neo’s product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more.

Yet if you’ve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should know that there are plenty of additional Mac apps that can elevate your productivity. Here are four cool and unexpected ones you should check out to take your MacBook Neo productivity to the next level.

Magnet keeps your workspace organized on the MacBook Neo’s small screen

One reason Apple can keep the price of the Neo so low is that it has the smallest display of any MacBook. At just 13 inches, the Neo has a smaller screen than both the 13.6-inch MacBook Air and 14-inch MacBook Pro. But smaller screen sizes mean that you have less desktop real estate to manage your overlapping windows, so things can get crowded fast.

Enter Magnet. This useful app helps you organize your desktop workspace in a snap. Magnet instantly moves your apps into a tiled pattern of your choice. For example, if you have a web browser, an email client, and a chatbot open, you can quickly arrange them into three neat windows on your screen. Or, you can use Magnet to snap one app to the left half of your screen, while the other two apps each fill one-quarter of the right side. The tiled arrangements are up to you.

Magnet perfectly aligns window sizes with a click, so you don’t have to waste time resizing your app windows manually, leaving more time for productivity.

Glide sharpens your reading focus

Small screens like Neo’s can also make it harder to focus on your content, especially when reading long text documents. Sentences in a document or web page can blend together over time, and if we look away for a moment, it might take a few moments to find the sentence we were reading, breaking our concentration.

That’s where Glide comes in. The app dims your entire screen except for a narrow band running across its full width. This band functions as a rectangular spotlight that highlights your text and follows your cursor. The idea is to make it hover over the line you’re reading, which helps you focus. It also acts as a helpful visual cue of where you left off in the document when you return to your computer after stepping away.

Perplexity is the AI chatbot Apple Intelligence should have been

Apple markets the MacBook Neo as a great computer for using its Apple Intelligence tools. The problem, though, is that Apple Intelligence is a pretty disappointing AI platform. Everything from its writing to its image generation tools is fairly lackluster compared to other AI options.

But the biggest drawback of Apple Intelligence is that you can’t use it like most people are accustomed to using AI: in a chatbot format. Sure, you can ask Apple Intelligence questions via voice or text, but the platform doesn’t provide a history of your conversations, and the answers it gives, frankly, aren’t very good.

That’s why Neo owners should download the Perplexity app. This is the chatbot Apple didn’t include with the Neo. It’s also notably better than competitors like ChatGPT at research tasks, such as the kind you do for school or work, because it cites where it found the answers it provides to you.

Soulver 3 is the calculator for people who prefer words over math

In both work and school, we often perform tasks that involve calculations. The new MacBook Neo has a Calculator app, but it’s quite basic. It also relies on your knowing the correct formulas to get accurate answers. If you don’t know how to formulate the equation for, say, the price of a $3,500 widget order after a 17% discount is applied, the standard Calculator app is useless anyway.

If you struggle with formatting equations, Soulver 3 is a game-changer. The app is part notepad, part calculator, which allows you to input equations using natural language prompts. For example, with the scenario above, it doesn’t matter if I don’t know the exact formula for calculating a percentage discount. I can simply type “17% off $3,500” into Soulver 3, and it will return the answer ($2,905.00). 

Even in an era of artificial intelligence, Soulver 3 is one of the most useful apps your Neo can offer, since LLM chatbots remain pretty bad at performing math computations.