Lenovo's MacBook Neo rival has landed a month early — but is it worth your money?

Lenovo's Snapdragon-based IdeaPad Vibe 14Q8X12 is on sale a month before its promised date US pricing starts at $799.99 for 8GB and 256GB, $100 above both Lenovo's IFA promise and the base MacBook Neo It beats the Neo on ports, keyboard backlighting, colors, and RAM ceiling, but its memory is soldered, and its 400-nit, 45% NTSC screen trails Apple's device Lenovo's IdeaPad Vibe 14Q8X12, the Snapdragon-powered version of the colorful laptop it pitched at IFA 2026 as an answer to Apple's MacBook Neo, is now on sale through Lenovo's own web stores in the US, UK, Canada, the Eurozone, Malaysia and Singapore.

That puts it just barely a month ahead of the November 2026 window Lenovo gave in Berlin in September, as Notebookcheck reports , with pre-orders due to start shipping on October 28.

The early arrival is the good news, but its price tag is the catch.

Lenovo announced the Vibe range at $699.99, matching the MacBook Neo to the dollar.

In the US, the Snapdragon model actually starts at $799.99 on Lenovo's product page , with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.

A month early, a hundred dollars late? The timing of Lenovo's original price matters.

Apple launched the MacBook Neo at $599 in March, then raised it to $699 on June 25 as the AI-driven memory shortage pushed up component costs.

Apple said it had "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly." Lenovo's $699.99 arrived in September as a deliberate match for the post-hike Neo.

At $799.99, the Vibe now costs about $100 more than the base Neo, and the same as Apple's 512GB model with Touch ID, which doubles the storage Lenovo gives US buyers.

Lenovo has not directly addressed the increase.

TechRadar saw this coming when the Vibe leaked in August , betting that even after Apple's price rise, "the Lenovo machine's going to be a fair bit more expensive." In the US, at least, our assessment has come full circle.

The math is kinder elsewhere, often helped along by Apple's pricing: Lenovo sells the laptop for £780 in the UK , and outside North America it ships with 512GB of storage by default.

That is £81 more than the base Neo's post-hike £699, but with twice the storage.

Canadian buyers pay CAD 1,099, Eurozone pricing runs from €849 to €999 depending on the country, and Malaysia and Singapore are priced at MYR 4,939 and SGD 1,379, respectively.