PC makers are in ‘shock’ over the MacBook Neo and are ‘seriously discussing’ how to compete — and that could benefit everyone

• The MacBook Neo is a ‘shock’ to the PC industry, Asus says
• Apple’s rivals are now ‘seriously discussing’ how to compete
• That response could be complicated by rising global memory costs

For a long time, Apple has refrained from competing at the more affordable end of the computing market, which may have led to a degree of complacency among rivals. That complacency has now been shattered with the launch of the MacBook Neo, and an Asus executive has neatly summed up the industry’s reaction to what is now one of the best budget laptops money can buy.

Speaking on an earnings call on March 10 (transcribed via Seeking Alpha), Asus’s Chief Financial Officer Nick Wu said Apple’s rivals are going to have to adapt quickly to the new situation — and with the ongoing memory shortage making RAM prices incredibly expensive for PC makers, that might not be easy.

On the call, Wu noted that: “given Apple’s historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market.” Wu’s comments were translated from Chinese by an interpreter.

Wu doesn’t think existing PC makers are sitting still after the launch of the MacBook Neo, adding: “I believe all PC vendors, including upstream vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, they’re all taking this very seriously, seriously discussing how to compete with this product in the entire PC ecosystem. So I think there are a lot of ongoing discussions about how we can — or how they can compete with the Neo.”

Working out how to compete

Competing with the MacBook Neo is clearly new territory for companies like Asus, because this isn’t just any old company we’re talking about — it’s Apple, one of the most powerful tech firms on the planet, with deep resources that enable it to develop and market competitive products.

Wu felt that the MacBook Neo has a weakness, in that it only comes with 8GB of memory that can’t be upgraded, and that “this may limit certain applications.” That’s true to a degree — in our MacBook Neo review, our writer found that “while you could fire up Blender and work on complex 3D scenes, the Neo is going to struggle.”

That said, Apple’s RAM uses a unified memory architecture with a shared memory pool, which in layman’s terms means it’s snappier than regular PC RAM. Indeed, our review concluded that “Overall, the performance of the MacBook Neo is very impressive for the price.”

Eventually, Wu believes that “the entire PC system will launch corresponding products to compete with Apple.” And that certainly makes sense — Apple’s ability to bring premium-feeling quality to a budget device like the MacBook Neo means its rivals need to up their game. The old low-price PC laptops, with their flimsy plastic cases and sub-par performance, won’t cut it anymore.

The ongoing RAM crisis could hamper their ability to compete, though. On the earnings call, Wu made the point that “memory prices have risen over 100% from quarter 4 last year to quarter 1 this year.” Once Asus’s existing stock is used up, “we will definitely need to adjust end product prices to some extent to reflect that change,” Wu said.

If affordable laptops are no longer especially affordable due to rising memory costs, that could work to Apple’s advantage. Given Apple’s massive purchasing power, it’s able to command lower RAM prices from its suppliers than some of its competitors, somewhat insulating it from the component chaos.

As Wu’s comments have made clear, Apple’s entry into the budget end of the PC market has sent its rivals scrambling. If PC makers are moved to improve their offerings in order to compete with Apple, that will benefit consumers everywhere, regardless of whether they prefer Windows or macOS.

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