The MacBook Neo is Giving PC Makers a Bad Week
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Apple’s affordable new MacBook Neo hit shelves on Wednesday and it’s already shaking up the low-end PC market
The new MacBook, which is now available in Apple retail stores and other Apple-authorized retail locations like Best Buy and Target, starts at just $599 ($499 for education buyers), making it an appealing alternative to the budget-priced PC laptops that have long existed in that sub-$1,000 price range.
Has the PC industry taken notice? Yes, you might say they have. In fact, PCMag reports that the chief financial officer of major PC maker Asus publicly declared the new entry-level MacBook “a shock.”
“Given Apple’s historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market,” ASUS CFO Nick Wu said in response to a question from Sino Securities about the MacBook Neo’s potential impact on the PC market in a translated transcript of the earnings call by Seeking Alpha.
Still, Wu claimed that the MacBook Neo’s limited specs may affect its ability to run certain “pro” apps, adding that “after the product officially released, we found the specs to have some limitations. For example, the memory is not upgradable, and it only has 8 gigabytes of memory. So this may limit certain applications.”
While Wu may have “concerns” about the performance of the MacBook Neo, initial reviewers of the new laptop have not shared similar concerns.
In a YouTube video, reviewer Patrick Tomasso easily performs several tasks on the Neo, including 4K video playback in DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro, Adobe Lightroom photo editing, and opening several tabs in Google Chrome. Several other reviewers also had praise for the MacBook Neo’s performance.
Wu also sees the MacBook Neo as more of a “content consumption” device like an iPad. However, he admitted that the PC industry is taking the debut of the MacBook Neo “very seriously.”
“So I believe all PC vendors, including upstream vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, they’re all taking this very seriously, seriously discussing how to compete with this product in the entire PC ecosystem,” continued Wu. “So I think there are a lot of ongoing discussions about how we can — or how they can compete with the Neo.”
“The entire PC system will launch corresponding products to compete with Apple,” Wu said.
That said, Wu believes the MacBook Neo’s actual impact on the PC market remains to be seen, saying, “The reason is that in the past, Apple’s faction versus the Intel faction have a somewhat segmented customer base due to software differences. It’s not as easy for users to switch between these 2 ecosystems.”
It remains to be seen how effectively PC makers can compete with the MacBook Neo. Apple holds a massive homefield advantage by repurposing the A18 Pro chip — already produced at scale for the 2024 iPhone lineup — at a time when PC vendors are reeling from double-digit price hikes on entry-level Intel and AMD silicon.
