The MacBook Neo caught many people off guard with its stunning price-to-performance ratio, impressive overall quality, and surprising affordability, coupled with strong distribution potential. Plenty of reviews are already calling it a true market “disruptor,” with some claiming Windows PCs are no longer competitive at all.
So the real question is: Will the MacBook Neo actually move the needle in a meaningful way? Is it positioned to take meaningful market share from Windows laptops, and perhaps even pull users away from Chromebooks or iPads?
Apple’s sales of about 24 million Macs for a base of 260 million users implies a life span for Macs of nearly 11 years. However, all the other PCs sold add up to 238 million for a user base of 1.2 billion. That means the life span for the non-Mac PC is only 5 years.
This is, of course, reflected in the price difference but with the MacBook Neo, the potential for a 10 year old life for a $500 laptop puts the Neo price at $50/yr or 14c/day. Based on data for 2025, the average selling price of a new Windows PC is estimated to be $600 to $900 for consumer models. At $700 for a life span of 5 years makes the PC cost $140/yr or 38c/day.
This means that the average PC is more than twice the cost of the MacBook Neo. Now that is a surprise.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup. As we wrote a few years ago:
Total Cost of Ownership should be of more concern to the world’s personal computer buyers than initial sticker price. You get what you pay for, so get a Mac. – MacDailyNews, June 25, 2004
Why are so many people so afraid to imagine an end to the dark ages of personal computing? Too many MSFT shares in the mutual fund? We have no such problem. Apple Mac will embrace, then extinguish – whether analysts grasp what’s happening or not. — MacDailyNews, March 23, 2007
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Macs have almost always had lower TCO than any non Mac systems. That even includes Linux systems.
Some of you may recall an internal study by Intel back well more than two decades ago. The study showed TCO for Macs (including internal help desk costs and other internal support costs) was significantly lower for Mac based systems than for Windows based systems. In fact the study showed the optimal, for Intel at least, would be with 97% Mac and 3% Windows. There were some situations that were so optimized for Windows based machines that a Mac in that place would have been a ludicrously high cost. This was back in the PowerPC Mac days, so Intel didn’t sell much into the Mac supply chain at that time. Very shortly after the report surfaced (leaked) Intel pulled the report on the study from any place that might have been able to access it.