If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that’s your budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange ThinkPad on eBay. It won’t outperform a Neo in terms of CPU and battery life but I guarantee it’ll be a better experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price point.
Sigh. I mean, even absent the obvious answers[1], that's just wrong anyway. You're being a snob. Want to run WSL? Run WSL. Want to run vscode natively? Ditto. Put it on a cheap TV and run your graphical layout and 3D modelling work. I mean, obviously it does all that stuff. OBVIOUSLY, because that stuff is all cheap and easy.
All the complaining you're doing is about preference, not capability. You're being a snob. Which is hardly weird, we're all snobs about something.
But snobs aren't going to buy the Neo either. Again, the business question here is whether the $350 junk users can be convinced to be snobs for $600.
[1] "Put Linux on it", "All of your stuff is in the cloud anyway", "It's still a thousand times faster than the machine on which I did my best work", etc...
But as to the 4G quip, that's showing some ignorance of where the market is. The value segment is filled with devices like this: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Stream-BrightView-N4120-Graphics/d...
That's a 16G windows box which will happily run multiple VMs for whatever your deployment environment is, something the Neo is actually going to struggle with. The Jasper Lake CPU is indeed awfully slow, but again for routine "dev" tasks that's just not a limit.
You would obviously refuse out of taste, but if you were actually forced to use this machine to do your job... you absolutely could.
$350 USD can get you a decent laptop with a SSD, 16GB RAM and something like an Intel N100 or N95. And they pretty comparable to a decent Intel Skylake CPU which are still pretty usable.
https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Keyboard-Fi...
https://www.amazon.com/AOC-Computer-Processor-Laptops-Window...
Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports. Besides ray traced games what can the Neo do that the others can't? They'll take longer but they'll get there.
And if you're willing to go used? That $350 goes a lot further.
8GB on Apple Silicon is far better than 16 GB on Wintel, and I don't event trust the quality of 16GB of RAM on a bottom of the barrel Windows machine.
Would you prefer a machine that is still good 7 years from now with less ports, or one with more ports that you have to replace in 2 years? Yes it is more expensive now, but over 7 years it is an absolute bargain.
Why would you have to replace it in 2 years? How do we know Apple will even be offering updates to Neo in 7 years? Will 8GB still be usable in 7 years really? 8GB is barely on the fence already.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple drops the Neo from software support in less than 7 years.
And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the lack of proper programmability of Windows (unless you use WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows machines, how much more a $350 machine.
Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly refuses to copy those.