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Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry (www.pcmag.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 59 points 6 months ago* (10 children)

As I always say:

...Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.

That's all they use their computers for. They don't want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid's picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.

And that's basically what the Neo is.

Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.

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  • [–] 25 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    If I were a laptop maker I would have seen the writing on the wall ten years ago and invested in Linux support, but hey

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Well, technically, System76 and a few other white box laptop makers did. But they don’t actually make laptops.

    And to be fair to big OEMs, “it uses Linux!” was a much harder thing to market before. I can see (outside of the Framework, which caters to enthusiasts) they only dabbled with it but didn’t invest.

    Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    yea, it would certainly have been a long-term investment.

    Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.

    I figured they would just rebrand some big stable distro

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    To be quite honest if IPads could just run Mac OS apps on it, it would be a dynamite device and I wouldn’t have even bought my MacBook. I bought an IPad for note taking, and basic work tasks I can do via SSH. The lack of desktop app support was the only thing that thing couldn’t do handily.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    Iirc the general assumption in tech spaces was that ios and macos are going to merge in two or three major versions, so I would imagine that apple is aware of this want in their consumer base as well.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    Eh, but will they? There’s a whole lot of OSX legacy Apple would have to throw away.

    I mean, I guess they could; they’ve done it before with architecture transitions. But this is different in that stuff on existing devices would stop working, whereas Intel or PPC Macs keep chugging along as-is.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I always thought of it going the other way, leave osx relatively untouched and make phones run on it, rather than taking ios as the standard.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago*

    I don’t buy that. No way they “open up” iOS to be more OSX-like, as that would spoil their cash cow (the App Store).

    I hate to sound so cynical, but I just don’t see any incentive for Apple to do that.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Of all the PC manufacturers, Apple are the ones who are most likely to sweep away legacy standards.

    Remember when they ditched DVD drives altogether, and the tech world threw a shit fit. When was the last time you saw a new laptop with a disc drive?

    They did the same with the 30 pin connector. USB-A as well.

    Of course, they can get away with it because they can also dictate which machines get which OS updates, so can entirely block devices that don't have hardware they no longer want to support.

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