Asus CEO S.Y. Hsu describes Apple’s new MacBook Neo as a “shock to the industry” due to its budget-friendly price, aiming to compete with Chromebooks and mid-level Windows laptops, despite its limited 8GB of unified memory. Picture: Michael Sherman/IOL
Image: Michael Sherman/IOL
It’s one thing for tech writers, YouTubers, or Apple themselves to say that a product will reshape the industry, but that’s exactly what Asus chief executive S.Y. Hsu inferred with his comments on the new MacBook Neo.
The new entry-level laptop launched by Apple earlier this month starts at R11,999 in South Africa and is by far the cheapest (factoring in inflation) Mac the tech giant has ever released.
It’s meant to compete directly with Chromebooks and mid-level Windows laptops.
Since the next cheapest new Apple laptop is last year’s M4 MacBook Air at R16,999, it makes the Neo a much cheaper entry into the Apple ecosystem.
“In the past, Apple’s pricing situation has always been high, so for them to release a very budget-friendly product, this is obviously a shock to the entire industry,” he said in comments translated from Chinese on the PC Mag website.
"In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product.”
Hsu did go on to point to the fact that the Neo only has 8GB of unified memory, saying that it would struggle with more intensive tasks as a result. While that is true, the Neo is directed at students and office workers whose main use case is web browsing and document creation.
However, since the Neo is exceptionally well-optimised with macOS, it can handle multitasking surprisingly well with its A18 Pro processor and how the operating system handles swap memory (using the hard drive to help the device when the unified memory comes under pressure).