ASUS Executive Says MacBook Neo is 'Shock' to PC Industry (pcmag.com)
- Reference: 0180950392
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/0615216/asus-executive-says-macbook-neo-is-shock-to-pc-industry
- Source link: https://www.pcmag.com/news/asus-co-ceo-macbook-neo-is-a-shock-to-the-pc-industry
> 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.
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> He also described the MacBook Neo as a "content consumption" device, similar to an iPad. "This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said. "How big of an impact [the MacBook Neo] will have on the PC industry will still require some time for us to observe," Hsu said while suggesting it might not gain traction among Windows PC users due to software differences. "Of course, the entire Windows PC ecosystem will push out products to compete against Apple," he added.
[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/04/1624211/apple-announces-low-cost-macbook-neo-with-a18-pro-chip
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/asus-co-ceo-macbook-neo-is-a-shock-to-the-pc-industry
[3] https://www.webcast-eqs.com/asus25q4/tc
Apple Chromebook (Score:1)
The way I see it, it's a glorified Chromebook at an inflated price. You kinda get what you're paying for here. It's not like it goes head to head with the rest of the Mac laptop line. No expandability, USB 2 only, no touch ID, slow charging, It really is a cheap notebook.
Re: (Score:3)
The Neo does have one USB 3 USB-C port and the upgraded 512 GB SSD model has a touch ID sensor, but everything else that you stated is correct.
I think that the non upgradable 8 GB of memory is the deal breaker here for most people thinking of switching from a PC. It ensures that this thing will be obsolete 3 or 4 years from now when Apple releases a new Mac OS version that "recommends" at least 12 GB of memory.
Re: (Score:2)
> It ensures that this thing will be obsolete 3 or 4 years from now when Apple releases a new Mac OS version that "recommends" at least 12 GB of memory.
One complication is whether the current version 26 (Tahoe) will be the last OS that supports Intel processors as Apple would like to stop supporting that architecture sooner.
The "mom just buy this" machine (Score:3)
For me in my career of both work and family Mac's have always been the preferred solution for non-techie family members; they're just harder to make a mess of things than Windows (which a user can get themselves into trouble with, even on W11) and Linux which is a whole nother can of worms that you're gonna be that family members tech support for.
Macs are boxed in walled gardens but that is a good thing in some situations. The downside has always been the price but now, now you better believe that this will be a solid suggestion when I get asked what computer to get your older relatives.
It doesn't hurt that Macs IMO have at least a pretty good minimum level of build quality compared to say Asus who while capable of building nice machine also make some crappy and fragile machines, as well as their customer support always, always, always being spotty and a PITA.
Really companies like Asus need to sort that shit out if they want to keep up, it's not just the machine itself but Apples entire system including the stores.
Re: (Score:2)
My mother has a Windows laptop that she uses once a year to run TurboTax. Apple's laptop is still overpriced for that use case. Now, this isn't to say Apple doesn't have a place with the aging boomer demographic - my mom is absolutely addicted to her iPad.
Re: (Score:2)
True, I suppose this is closer to an iPad with a keyboard than a Windows machine.
On the opposite end my mother never took to tablets in general, she is just so used to have a "real" computer even if the iPad would accomplish every goal she has.
Re: (Score:2)
Chromebooks serve the same function for me. They are cheaper too.
The reason this is disruptive is the Reality Distortion Field. People will want to pay more to get a low end Mac, than a decent Chromebook.
Google screwed up its streaming gaming service Stadia, and the number of games on ChromeOS is about as limited as on Mac. If they ever manage to get Android apps working seamlessly, that might give them an advantage, but it's hard to beat the RDF.
It's a gateway drug to Apple's farm, where you are the livest
He's not entirely wrong; but... (Score:3)
Calling out the 8GB of RAM is fair; but it seems hard to ignore how much of this devices is really a shot across the bow of the part that Asus and friends do control: the general build quality, screen, etc.
Asus can't do much about the fact that Apple can just throw a phone CPU into a computer and call it good enough with a reasonably straight face; but it is on them that the PC bargain bin has a lot of plasticy trash; and much of it isn't even the "clunky; but at least trivially repairable" trash like it once was. You do see the occasional combination of a real cheapie CPU (normally an N150 or one of the quasi-embedded Intels that they don't really want anyone to think about) with some degree of build quality from the slightly weirder chinese outfits like chuwi(when they aren't fudging the model numbers in firmware); but low-end PCs, to the degree they aren't just plain bad, seem to systematically overpay for CPU and neglect other elements.
Re: (Score:2)
I would say the Neo looks great for this price range, I agree with that, but you are kind of underselling the PC a little.
N150 laptops are usually wayyy cheaper than that. At the 599 range there are decent options with Ryzen CPU's, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and reasonable build quality. Especially HP and lenovo have some pretty decent build quality devices in this range.
And really with apple repair costs and quality issues you should include applecare+ for $140 as a necessary addition for any macbook.
Re: (Score:2)
There are some good laptops in the 500-600 range. But there are also a lot of bad ones too. Also the problem for consumers is that these laptops come with Windows 11 Home, the worst version of Windows 11 if you can believe it. :P
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely, N150s are very much the cheap seats. My point with them was more that PC OEMs mostly don't seem to do build quality first/performance second designs, at least not as a category of cheap laptop(that's much more a thing you find with the 'gamer'/'glossy consumer' vs. 'corporate IT' divide above $1000).
Intel and AMD are in the somewhat embarrassing position of a 4w phone SoC actually punching pretty hard compared to their cheapie offerings(though in both cases you'll have more options on RAM, at
consumption device? (Score:3)
> He also described the MacBook Neo as a "content consumption" device, similar to an iPad. "This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook,"
Not really, it's not a high end machine but it's perfectly capable for most users. And with the price of memory going up people are still buying windows laptops with 8GB or even 4, which will perform much worse than the macbook.
Re: (Score:2)
It also seems like a mistake to tag it as a 'content consumption device' when anyone buying one of these is specifically choosing it vs. the Ipad Air of the same price that is actually more powerful across the board; but without a keyboard. It's not a high end video editing and finite element analysis workstation; but, when it is going up directly against ipads more or less because it has keyboard and a conventional pointing device it looks like the opposite of a 'content consumption device'(at least in th
Re: (Score:2)
> 8GB ram will just eat swap and ware it out and you can't upgrade the storage as well.
My coming up to 4 years old 8GB Macbook Pro M2 hasn't. For daily stuff like media consumption, web browsing, document editing, light photo and video editing which is the bulk of what non-tech users do it's absolutely fine.
What's the towing capacity of this Prius? (Score:2)
Complaining about 8GB on a Neo is like complaining that the towing capacity of the 2025 Prius can't match that of the Ford F150. They're different products designed for different audiences. A prius can tow stuff...but no one buys one with the intention of hauling trailers. Similarly, no one is buying a mac neo to do hardcore resource-intensive computing. It's a student laptop or a cheap device for people who weren't otherwise planning on owning a laptop in their home and rely on an iPhone or iPad now (l
A little bit of denial (Score:2)
> He also described the MacBook Neo as a "content consumption" device, similar to an iPad. "This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said
That describes pretty much most laptops in the $500-600 range. A few online reviews have shown the Neo can handle some compute intensive tasks. One reviewer was editing 4K video in Davinci Resolve then switched over to edit a 4K video in Final Cut Pro then switched over to Chrome. All 3 programs were running in the background at the same time. Now the Neo will not be fast for those workloads, but it can do them. It can probably handle the computing requirements for the average consumer.
The $500-600 budget l
Re: (Score:2)
> A few online reviews have shown the Neo can handle some compute intensive tasks. One reviewer was editing 4K video in Davinci Resolve then switched over to edit a 4K video in Final Cut Pro then switched over to Chrome.
With the largest storage option being 512GB, you're not going to be doing much video editing on this laptop even if the CPU is technically up to the task. Therein lies Apple's usual budget device pain point: they won't let you equip it with better storage and RAM specs, because that might cannibalize sales of their higher end machines.
Re: (Score:2)
> With the largest storage option being 512GB, you're not going to be doing much video editing on this laptop even if the CPU is technically up to the task.
My point was the Neo is more than capable of editing 4K video without issues unlike what Hsu implied.
> Therein lies Apple's usual budget device pain point: they won't let you equip it with better storage and RAM specs, because that might cannibalize sales of their higher end machines.
That is the same budget pain point as Windows machines. Adding more RAM and storage is not free. It will increase the price.
Re: (Score:2)
> That is the same budget pain point as Windows machines. Adding more RAM and storage is not free. It will increase the price.
Many entry-level laptops still actually have socketed NVME drives. Yeah, it certainly isn't free, but if you wanted a cheap machine with a ton of storage, that's absolutely doable in the PC realm. But okay, yeah, most people these days aren't going to crack open their brand new laptop and swap the drive. Still, it's rather obvious Apple as intentionally gimped the storage configurations (most machines at this price point offer 512GB / 1TB as the options) and making the RAM not configurable at all was cle
Schools (Score:1)
Immediately bought one for my grade schooler to replace her school issued POS Chromebook. It will be big.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, many schools like the Chomebooks but are sick of Google's shit on other fronts. I'm not confident they'll prefer Apple's MDM but these decisions are based on pain, not dispassionate logic.
Meanwhile OLPC turned out to lobotomize students so the whole thing should be thrown overboard. Buy paper and pencils with the money.
Neo is pretty significant.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people saying it's just "a glorified Chromebook" are missing the point, IMO. Yeah, as Apple products go, it's underpowered and has limited ports. But it runs MacOS at a price point that was unreachable before without buying someone's older, used Mac.
Chromebooks suck, by and large, because they're designed to run Google's web software suite for use in a classroom. People wanting an all-purpose laptop at a low price point find out they got the low price point but not much else.
A Macbook Neo will come with official Apple support (including things like ability to walk into any retail Apple Store world-wide and make appointments to get some free help or training on using the machine and Apple's software apps). And recent versions of MacOS seem to be pretty optimized to run apps well inside an 8GB RAM limitation. (Remember that Apple was trying to trim the entry level price point on other machines of theirs like the Macbook Air for years by skimping on RAM. They had to make sure their OS could actually do useful things inside that memory footprint.)
Re: (Score:1)
That could end up being a problem for Apple. If the neo has high sales, to a largely illiterate audience, that then swamps the stores for help. Its a problem. Low margin is not going to pay for the support and will show up as either Apple support has gotten worse (bad for Apple's image) or profits because Apple had to hire more support staff without supporting profit from the neo sales.
Re: (Score:3)
One of the ways Apple lowered the price to $599 was the fact they used the A18 Pro chip. There is already a node st TSMC making the chip so they did not have to start a new line. The 8GB limitation is because the A18 SOC has only 8GB RAM. Modifying it to use 16GB would require designing a new SOC. This is also the reason the Neo does not have Thunderbolt as the SOC does not support it.
It will be interesting to see the specs of the next generations of Neo. If Apple uses the A19 Pro SOC next year, they could
People WANT an Apple chromebook, not iPad (Score:2)
Agreed...to add to your point....The vast majority of consumers want a laptop at home to browse the web, maybe type an e-mail or text. While iPads sound good on paper, they just suck. Apple has been trying to "make fetch happen" with the iPad as a softcore computer and it just doesn't. I know easily 200 people who own iPads. Most of them do not like using them for web browsing for more than a quick lookup. They're either barely used or just a portable TV/gaming device. Researching a major purchase, li
Re: (Score:2)
> I know easily 200 people who own iPads. Most of them do not like using them for web browsing for more than a quick lookup.
The real pain point of trying to use an iPad as a web browsing device is all the damn ads on the internet, and the fact that Apple has locked the browser down so tight that any sort of adblock implementation is easily defeated by anti-adblock scripts.
Also, after a few years of ownership, they just get dog slow in general. I've got a 5th gen iPad mini that I now only use for replying to texts and checking my Ring cameras. It's completely useless for anything else, since even just navigating around the UI h
...because THAT'S the problem... (Score:1)
> 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.
...well, first off, 8GB of RAM *should* be enough for general use. As an example, MS Office 2007 required 256MB of RAM, Office 2003 required 128...and it doesn't have eight times the features to justify the 2GB RAM requirement for Office 2024. Don't get me started on Acrobat. Chrome is another notorious RAM eater, but that tends to be based on the amount of javascript websites are bloated with - there's no reason for a single website to be taking 4GB of RAM, and when they do, it's NEVER for a reason that be
Surprised no one mentioned financing (Score:3)
Apple's real industry "shock" isn't that they released a new laptop with milquetoast hardware specs, it's that it (along with the rest of Apple's major products) can be purchased with [1]0% financing. [apple.com] They've taken a page right out of the auto industry's playbook - your product offering doesn't have to be anything special if you've got killer financing deals .
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102730
Dunno about "shock" (Score:2)
8 GB of "unified memory", sharing that pool with cpu, gpu and whatever they're calling "neural net" these days. Almost certainly soldered in, not expandable.
256 or 512 GB main storage. I'm speculating, but I suspect that also is glued in, (or the case is glued together not expandable except by USB port.
All this for about $150-$200 more than a comparably outfitted Windows laptop.
Mind you, I profoundly dislike Windows. But people tend to buy Macs for creation, and this one seems to be outfitted prim
Pincer Movement (Score:2)
Everyone's stuck between rising prices and Apple suddenly competing on entry-level options. That's going to take a bite out of everyone simply for *existing* because the "not having Apple money" is no longer an excuse. Even if it's underpowered or has other technical limitations, they're competing at a price point where those sorts of things are common and if they can execute half-decently, they're going to be viewed more favorably and get more credit for their accomplishments in the space, even if they're
What you do? (Score:2)
Try to out-China China?
Re: (Score:2)
Dunno, it seems more of an aye-pad without (as I understand it) the touchscreen. I don't understand what is it for at all.
Re: (Score:2)
The huge difference is macOS. Chromebooks don't even run a real OS and application software.