The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.

I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.

The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.

I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.

In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it's much better for productivity, development, and games, so it's well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn't know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.

My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.

Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.

Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS

The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.

> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.

Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.

There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.

I've bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.

A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?

Doesn't that M1 Air have a much, much slower CPU?

Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.

Maybe a slightly used one as well.

But I think these are very tempting for brand new.

> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers

This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.

For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.

For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.

On the refurb market, you can get a Macbook Air at the 16-512 configuration for only a few hundred more, which is a better value.

But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.

I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.

What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?