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.

Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still ~2x the price and lacks the management tools that Google Classroom provides

> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.

Interesting pricing differential. Seems in your country, that IdeaPad is significantly cheaper than the price in the US. But for your Macbook Neo, it's the other way around.

Wonder why that is.

No idea. Maybe Lenovo includes purchasing power in the price calculation for some reason, such as making more money in the U.S. while gaining market share here in Czechia, where purchasing power is lower. Apple may be able to afford not to do that.

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.

I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.

There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.

Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.

I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).

After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.

> and to never do anything that other people than the owner want

Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.

There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.

The purpose of an OS is to run applications. Windows and MacOS have the applications people want or need to run.

Other OSes can run the browser, which runs many of the applications you want.

So? Acer also makes Chromebooks.

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.