When we reported last week that the $599 MacBook Neo set off alarm bells across the PC industry, the hand-wringing was mostly coming from pundits and outside observers. Now PC makers are saying it out loud — on earnings calls, no less.
ASUS co-CEO S.Y. Hsu didn’t mince words on the company’s most recent quarterly call. Apple’s move into budget-friendly territory is “a shock to the entire industry,” he said, adding that across the entire PC ecosystem, “there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product.”
MacBook Neo shakes up PC industry
During an earnings call on March 10, ASUS co-CEO S.Y. Hsu said the MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the PC industry, PC Mag reported. Hsu added that Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and PC vendors are already discussing how to respond. This echoed our report about Windows mavens voicing fears of hordes of users moving over to MacBook in our post, “MacBook Neo sets off panic in Windows land.”
This is precisely the scenario Windows Central‘s Zac Bowden warned about. The sub-$600 Windows laptop market has long been, as Bowden colorfully put it, a dumping ground for “e-waste.” Now the largest PC vendor in the world is publicly acknowledging that Apple could eat their lunch at that price point.
Is MacBook Neo just a ‘content consumption’ device?
Photo: Apple
To be fair, Hsu tried to soften the blow. He described the MacBook Neo as a “content consumption” device more akin to an iPad than a traditional laptop. He pointed to its fixed 8GB of memory as a ceiling on what users can do with it.
It’s a familiar deflection — and one that’s already wearing thin. If limited RAM and modest storage make a laptop a “content consumption” device, then ASUS and other makers pump out tons of them at $600 or less. But Neo performance metrics are already showing it’s got chops.
The timing, as we noted, couldn’t be worse for the Windows ecosystem. PC makers are already bracing for price increases driven by an AI-fueled memory shortage, with DRAM costs having jumped more than 100% quarter over quarter. And the crunch isn’t expected to ease until late 2027 when new factories come online. Apple, meanwhile, launched a $599 machine.
Whole PC industry will react
Wu confirmed that Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all actively in discussions about how to respond, and that “the entire PC system will launch corresponding products to compete with Apple.” That’s a remarkable sentence to hear from a company of ASUS’s stature — an acknowledgment that the whole Windows supply chain is now essentially in reactive mode.
Whether those responses will be enough remains the open question. As Bowden argued, the MacBook Neo isn’t just a cheap laptop. It’s a recruiting device — and Apple even built a “Switch to Mac” page directly into the Neo’s product listing to make that explicit.
The long game, as we wrote last week, is about where today’s students and first-time laptop buyers form their platform loyalties. Wu himself acknowledged the uncertainty, saying simply: “The final market competition outcome is hard to predict. We just need more time.”
The clock is ticking — and now the competition is admitting they can hear it.
The MacBook Neo is Apple’s entry-level laptop. It has Apple’s signature all-day battery life and ease of use. It can swim through web browsing, document editing and other basic work tasks.
But if you want higher specs than its 8 GB memory or the maximum 512 GB storage, the MacBook Air may be a better choice.
- 16-hour battery life
- Bright, fun colors
- Thin and light design
- No MagSafe
- USB 3 and USB 2 ports
- No support for high-resolution displays
David Snow, an expert on Apple hardware and software, writes on a variety of technological and cultural topics for Cult of Mac. They include Apple news, technology buying guides, and features about computer setups and Apple TV shows and movies.
With 30 years of experience covering technology and other subjects, he has written and edited for numerous print and online publications, including CMP Media, TechTV.com, CNET, Wired News, Red Herring magazine, Law.com, The National Law Journal and Law Technology News magazine. Among other roles, he served as executive editor of the Law.com network of websites and editorial director, technology, for ALM Media.
Snow graduated with a B.A. from Syracuse University with majors in magazine journalism and psychology. While there, he worked as a reporter for The Daily Orange newspaper and associate editor of Equal Time magazine.
Founder of the blog At the Waterline, he can be reached on X (formerly Twitter) via @atthewaterline and on Mastodon via @dsnow.
