- MacBook Neo is a ‘shock’ to the PC industry, says Asus
- Apple’s rivals are now “seriously discussing” how to compete
- That answer could be complicated by rising global memory costs.
Apple has long refrained from competing at the more affordable end of the computing market, which may have led to a degree of complacency among its 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 conference call on March 10 (transcribed via Looking Alpha), Asus CFO Nick Wu said that Apple’s rivals will have to adapt quickly to the new situation, and with the current 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 high price, the launch of such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market.” Wu’s comments were translated from Chinese by an interpreter.
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Wu doesn’t think existing PC makers will sit still after the launch of the MacBook Neo, adding: “I think all PC vendors, including vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, are taking this very seriously, seriously discussing how to compete with this product across the entire PC ecosystem. So I think there are a lot of discussions going on about how we can, or how they can compete with the Neo.”
Discovering how to compete
Competing with the MacBook Neo is clearly new territory for companies like Asus, because we are not talking about just any company: it is Apple, one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet, with extensive resources that allow it to develop and market competitive products.
Wu felt that the MacBook Neo has a weakness in that it only comes with 8 GB of memory that cannot be upgraded, and that “this may limit certain applications.” That’s true to some extent: in our MacBook Neo review, our writer found that “while could Fire up Blender and work on complex 3D scenes, the Neo will 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. In fact, our review concluded that “Overall, the performance of the MacBook Neo is very impressive for the price.”
Over time, 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 a premium feel to a budget device like the MacBook Neo means its rivals need to up their game. The old, low-priced laptops, with their flimsy plastic casings and inferior performance, just aren’t cutting it anymore.
However, the current RAM crisis could hinder its ability to compete. On the earnings conference call, Wu noted that “memory prices have increased more than 100% from the fourth quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year.” Once Asus’s existing stock runs out, “we will definitely need to adjust the prices of final products to some extent to reflect that change,” Wu said.
If affordable laptops are no longer especially affordable due to rising memory costs, that could benefit Apple. Given Apple’s enormous purchasing power, it is able to demand 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 segment of the PC market has made its rivals nervous. If PC makers decide to improve their offerings to compete with Apple, that will benefit consumers around the world, regardless of whether they prefer Windows or macOS.
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