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.
I don’t know what Asus is doing as I haven’t owned one, but some manufacturers are finally starting to do LPCAMM2. Which near me is actually cheaper than SODIMMs. And is technically superior. One reason (besides being able to sell you a new device when memory goes bad) that manufacturers solder RAM it is that it allows for faster speeds than SODIMMs, at lower power requirements.
That may be the case, but the most irritating thing is that thy fill all available spots with the lowest-capacity chips that meet the requested provisioning spec, instead of taking the requested provisioning and using the fewest higher-capacity chips needed to meet the provisioning spec. The latter, at least, would leave spots open for an authorized repair location to manually solder on more approved chips of compatible spec.