Apple’s MacBook Neo has revolutionised the budget laptop market by offering superior performance and build quality at a competitive price, challenging Windows laptops and Google Chromebooks to enhance their offerings. Picture: Michael Sherman/IOL
Image: Michael Sherman/IOL
It’s no exaggeration to say that Apple’s MacBook Neo has reshaped the budget laptop market.
Apple’s first foray into the budget laptop market could not have gone better, since the starting price for the Neo of R11,999 placed this new offering as a direct competitor to the vast majority of Windows laptops and Google’s Chromebooks.
The difference with the Neo though, was that even though it was powered by an iPhone chip, it is extremely powerful at that price point.
The Neo can handle any office work right up to basic 4K video editing without any trouble, and it’s a fact that it will outperform any Windows laptop or Chromebook with the same - and sometimes superior - specs.
The new Chromebook announced earlier this month is now called Googlebook, which sounds suspiciously similar to MacBook. This laptop though, has been ‘designed from the ground up’ with AI integration.
It seems like every non-Mac-OS device really seems to be going wrong, as AI features should be a supplementary function, not a core one. This is where Apple really should be copied, because while its hardware and software are perfectly integrated - it’s never for a new feature that has not yet proved successful in the case of AI.
The closest Windows laptop to the Neo is probably the Asus Vivobook. While this range from Asus starts at around R5,499, the R10,999 Vivobook X1504 is the nearest in price. Though you get double the RAM/Unified memory with 16GB and 512GB storage as opposed to the Neo’s 256GB - there’s still little comparison in build quality.
The Neo will be lighter, quieter, and feature double the battery life. In terms of performance, the Neo will either be the same if not better in most areas with the use of swap memory allowing the Apple product to compete with devices boasting more memory.
There are also rumours that the next version of the Neo is on its way soon. It’s expected to have 12GB of Unified RAM and more storage, and if that’s the case, that’s even worse news for Windows and Google.