How will the Windows world respond to the $599 Macbook Neo?
And I genuinely wonder if we can reflect on it in a non-hyperbolic way. I just saw the $599 MacBook Neo, and felt like Apple is doing something the Windows PC world just can’t touch right now, which was a bittersweet realization, as I can see all the steps of the way that got us here, and it's great to see an excellent product in this segment, but also sad to realize how hard it is going to be for Microsoft and the Windows world to match that at this point. For $599, you’re getting an ultra-slim aluminum laptop, a 500-nit display, and a chip whose single-core performance beats most of the fastest Windows laptops costing multiple times as much. Compare that to what $600 buys you in the Windows world: a creaky plastic shell, a washed-out 250-nit screen, a terrible trackpad, and a processor reminiscent of a 2020 i5 (plus a fan that sounds like a jet engine). That may or may not work reliably. The Neo comes with 8GB of RAM, and Apple’s unified memory architecture and leaner OS make 8GB go surprisingly far. 8GB is impossible on Windows anymore. Between the two alone, attempting to deliver a comparable experience on a Windows laptop would be significantly more expensive for an OEM trying to compete right now. They'd need an expensive 16GB of RAM, and a far more expensive chip, and they still wouldn't get a device that feels as responsive because of Windows. Then there’s reliability. Windows Connected/Modern Standby are still a disaster years later. Throwing a Windows laptop in your bag means living in fear of a gamble on whether it wakes up, or if it’ll come out a dead hot brick. Even the newest Windows ARM chips (like the Snapdragon X Elite), despite initial hopes, still struggle with overnight battery drain and fans spinning while supposedly asleep. They seem to be as affected by the poor sleep design in Windows, but just die slower. Close a Mac, and that’s it. power cuts to the cores, it goes to sleep, and it stays asleep. Walk around a city for eight hours, pull it out for a meeting, and the battery is exactly where you left it. To me, this is such a huge reliability gain we just can't have on Windows. And I won't even get into drivers, OEM bloat and other well established software issues. With all the issues plaguing Windows and its core functionality and key factors affecting competitiveness in markets that OEMs are trying to play in, you'd expect Microsoft to take action addressing them stat, but that doesn't seem to be happening as Windows is going in the opposite direction with bloat (and, ehm, "Microslop"). Windows does have perks around legacy software support, having full control over the file system, ability to launch tools and games without relying on still complex translation layers or virtualization, and with limited success at that. But the numbers of perks are kind of dying and getting overshadowed by the issues that exist in fundamental user experience that other vendors just deliver far better nowadays. If you want an ultra-portable $600 Windows laptop that’s fast, reliable, doesn’t feel like a cheap plastic toy, comes with polished software, you're really out of luck right now. If you want one that doesn't randomly die in its sleep, you're all out of luck altogether. Neo’s aggressive pricing is quite a surprise and a wake-up call that Apple, a high-profit-margin company, suddenly has a way more polished, faster, and also cheaper laptop now. I just don't see the Windows world having any response to it. There are so many things that would need to change around Windows at this point to even make it a possibility.
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