Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo has stunned lower-priced competitors, including Asus, peddler of plastic junk laptops. Priced $500 below the current MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo represents a major disruption.
Asus CFO Nick Wu described the ultra-affordable machine as “certainly a shock to the entire market,” then immediately tried to denigrate MacBook Neo as a tablet-like content consumption device.
Jordan Hart for Business Insider:
Apple is entering unfamiliar territory with a $599 MacBook, and competitors are noticing.
The tech giant is known for high price tags on pretty much all of its gadgets, but every once and while it offers an affordable option for those who want a lower price point. Such is the case with the new MacBook Neo it revealed in March.
The drop is making waves in the laptop business as Apple enters a new price bracket. Taiwanese PC maker Asus fielded questions about the impact of the affordable MacBook Neo during its earnings call on Tuesday.
“Given Apple’s historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market,” Asus financial chief Nick Wu said, according to a transcript translated to English that was published by Seeking Alpha.
However, he said Asus observed “limitations” in the MacBook Neo, such as its 8 GB of memory, which may limit certain applications.
“This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios,” Wu said. “The Neo feels more like a tablet, because tablets are mostly for content consumption.”
MacDailyNews Take: Trying to tag MacBook Neo as a “content consumption” machine isn’t going to work, ye peddler of cheap plastic junk. Independent MacBook Neo reviews all bear this out.
The fear from the likes of Asus et al. is palpable 🙂.
Everyone who experiences macOS via an inexpensive MacBook Neo isn’t going back to a Windows laptop or Chromebook. It’s a one-way street. Asus’ Wu and the rest of the junk PC laptop peddlers are right to be soiling themselves.
And, as Wu likely knows but would never publicly admit, 8GB in Apple Silicon is vastly different than 8GB of RAM in some shitty plastic Asus laptop.
The 8GB of memory in the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro chip is fundamentally different than the typical 8GB RAM in an Asus laptop due to Apple’s unified memory architecture (UMA).
MacBook Neo (with A18 Pro + 8GB unified memory) is up to 50% faster in everyday tasks and 3x faster in AI workloads vs. comparable 8GB Intel-based PCs.
In a nutshell: A cheap Asus laptop with 8GB RAM would often feel horribly constrained under load due to its fragmented architecture, while A18 Pro’s 8GB unified memory in MacBook Neo punches well above its spec weight.
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