The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
To be quite honest if IPads could just run Mac OS apps on it, it would be a dynamite device and I wouldn’t have even bought my MacBook. I bought an IPad for note taking, and basic work tasks I can do via SSH. The lack of desktop app support was the only thing that thing couldn’t do handily.
Iirc the general assumption in tech spaces was that ios and macos are going to merge in two or three major versions, so I would imagine that apple is aware of this want in their consumer base as well.
Eh, but will they? There’s a whole lot of OSX legacy Apple would have to throw away.
I mean, I guess they could; they’ve done it before with architecture transitions. But this is different in that stuff on existing devices would stop working, whereas Intel or PPC Macs keep chugging along as-is.