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.
Can I put Linux on it? Because otherwise refurb Thinkpad Carbons are cheaper and better.
You can’t really compare refurb to new. If you do, you might as well consider refurb Macbook Pros instead of the Macbook Neo too.
A new X1 Carbon is 1749 EUR starting price near me. The Neo is 719. A 5 year old X1 Carbon, refurbed, is 725. It’s not a bad laptop by any means, but it also has soldered RAM much like the Mac, so at 5 years of age it may not exactly be super reliable past the warranty which isn’t all that long for either case.
I’m sure Asahi support will be available soon. If these had 16gb of memory, I’d seriously consider it as a new Linux laptop. Even with the global AI-fabricated RAM shortage, 8GB hasn’t been a reasonable amount of RAM for over a decade.
Has Asahi matured? Last I heard there were still quite a few unsupported features like touch ID and displayport over usb c