I’ll be honest, the new Macbook Neo I supsect is going to be a HUGE disruptor in the Windows personal laptop market.
I think a ton of college students will not be getting Neo’s rather than a cheap windows machine. When the calculus was a $400 windows machine or $1200 for the cheapest mac, a lot of cheap plastic, low spec windows machines were sold. When the calculus is $400 windows machine, or a $500 ($100 off for students) Macbook NEO, I suspect highly that a lot of folks will decide the extra $100 is worth it.
This isn’t something that is going to drastically change the enterprise overnight, but long term... I don’t see how this doesn’t continue to eat away at MS’s market share.
ChromeBook already owns the super-cheap, and the grade school/high school educational market. If the move to real machines by these kids now becomes largely a step to the Mac Eco System, not just the rich status driven kids or the computer geeks, but the mainstreams it, its hard to see how this trend won’t further move up into the enterprise in time.
We shall see, but one of the biggest knocks on apple from its founding, that being price and value, just largely evaporated if this thing even remotely performs like it appears it should.
We shall see how this all shakes out, but I know if was a maker of cheap low end PC laptops, I’d be nervous as hell.
“I think a ton of college students will not be getting Neo’s rather than a cheap windows machine.”
The display is only 13” which is not helpful for real learning and absorbing material. Such small size leads to furtive skimming. Though this tiny Neo thing can be hooked into a larger 24” external monitor......13” Neo is good for taking notes in class and ultra portability.
My take is that 15.6” is minimum size laptop display for a student. Then you have 16” and 17.3” laptops.
The big weakess of that machine is the small nonexpandable RAM, but for many desk surfers, they won’t care, and it is an entry point into the Apple ecosystem which I feel to be superior.