My point is that Apple is in many ways joining Acer, not bringing their luxury product down to the masses.

Yes, in many ways they’re bringing a very polished product to the space. But in many other ways, look closely and you’ll see the cut corners.

Again, I’ve felt the Neo in person. The chassis feels nice, sure. It’s not built to the same level as Apple’s other products, though.

The bottom plate is not CNCed, it’s a stamped aluminum plate. That means there is variation in the gap along the bottom of the laptop between the man case and the bottom plate that doesn’t exist on the Air or Pro.

Again, the trackpad is good but is worse than many haptic trackpads offered by PC manufacturers like Lenovo.

Again, if you think the PC industry has no chance of competing, go to your retailer website and look at street prices. Look at laptop reviews from places like Just Josh Tech on YouTube. PC manufacturers aren’t making trash.

Acer is actually a great example of a really solid PC. I felt the $530 model Micro Center is selling and it seemed to do the job: thin and light enough, felt sturdy, similar trackpad to the Neo, better specs and I/O. I’d say I only wanted the display to be a little better, though on the plus side it was bigger than the Neo’s cramped 13”.

This isn’t 2005. There is a misguided assumption to assume that PCs are still trash like they were 10 years ago. They just aren’t.

One little random bit to point out: there are 100 million Mac users globally as of 2024. There are more than 900 million PC gamers globally.

So, if I’m a high school student or college student who has money for one computer and I am a member of that group of 900 million PC gamers, I might just go get a last gen Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or something similar in the current gen from someone like MSI with an RTX 5050.

I would deal with a chunkier plastickier laptop but it would get similar battery life to the Neo for office tasks and I could actually play games. 16GB RAM. Modular storage. Price is around $700.

And I’ll be honest, that trackpad ain’t gonna be much worse than the Neo. And I’ll get to keep my backlit keyboard and have some I/O.

Apple Business