The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
Honestly, I’m just surprised this is the first time someone has dared to put a phone SOC in a laptop chassis.
It seemed kind of obvious to me that a laptop experience on phone hardware (but like… with a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse/trackpad) was sort of perfect for most use cases. I just assumed that it would come in the form of a phone docked in to a hollowed out laptop. The core issue was just that the software was awful with such a set up. Apple just kind of bypassed that by having their whole OS and everything on it switch over to ARM and just running a non-mobile OS on a phone SOC.
It seems like Google is kind of edging that way by merging chrome OS in to android. And windows was maybe flailing that direction with windows on arm… but… I think that was mostly just them trying to copy Apple without really thinking to hard about it.
I’m probably missing something fundamental, but isn’t this just a Chromebook?
There are some Snapdragon laptops but they’re not exactly the same as the snapdragon phone SoCs and they tend to be expensive
Apple was the only one with the vertical to pull it off