MacBook Neo is living rent-free in PC rivals’ heads

Apple, for all its stagecraft and marketing savvy, often seems to get the best PR when it’s not in the spotlight. Attention brings criticism, and the afterglow of an Apple event, tech columnists and TikTok trolls alike line up to dunk on the iPhone Air’s plateau, say, or the Mac Pro’s wheels. But watch the vibe change when another company takes its turn on the stage.

The critics and memers gave the MacBook Neo a comparatively easy ride when it turned up at the start of March. But last week, a week in which Apple made no announcements about the product and implemented no special marketing efforts, was perhaps its best yet, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s clumsy efforts to take it down. We’re not owned, they both insisted, while slowly shrinking and turning into a corncob.

Google started things off by unveiling the Googlebook, a Gemini-pushing device which my colleague on PC World astutely calls the world’s first anti-personal computer. The software philosophy behind the Googlebook is AI-first, but its design and hardware approach are clearly Neo-second: an obvious attempt to recapture the lightning which Apple bottled so successfully a couple of months ago.

We don’t yet know any tech specs, and Google promises something “premium” to sit above the Chromebook. But such terms are relative, and we should remember that Chromebooks can be had for less than $200. Given the new device’s role as an AI delivery system and Android emulator, it seems unlikely that Acer, Dell, and the rest will cram it with top-tier componentry. Expect something sleek, lightweight, but affordable; $599 has a nice ring to it.

While Google was flattering Apple with imitation, Microsoft was performatively insisting that the MacBook Neo isn’t a big deal at all. Hilariously, the company went to the trouble of commissioning a super-serious and definitely unbiased whitepaper on the subject. It turns out that we were all sadly mistaken, and the Neo isn’t an excellent budget laptop after all. Much better, our researchers explain, to plump for (checks notes) laptops which are way more expensive, made of plastic, stuffed with bloatware, or all of the above.

I could spend a whole column talking about the silliness of the whitepaper–indeed, I strongly recommend that you read Roman Loyola’s polite demolition of its claims–but the real problem is not so much that the study is wrong. It’s that Microsoft thought commissioning and publishing the study would help. If you have to commission whitepapers to tell people not to buy your rival’s laptops, you’ve already lost. And paying researchers to prove something isn’t a big deal, rather shows that you think it is.

But perhaps all this foolishness shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The MacBook Neo has done a good job of selling itself to budget laptop buyers, but it’s done a far better job of getting under the skin of rival tech companies. Right from the start, comparisons showed that the machine was performing better at a role traditionally filled by Windows machines, and PC makers have been panicking ever since.

The funniest part is that the industry can’t decide whether the Neo is good, and therefore worth copying, or bad, and therefore not a threat. Sometimes you’ll find a PC maker unable to decide between these two mutually exclusive positions. Shortly after the Neo launch, Asus CEO S.Y. Hsu admitted it was “a shock to the entire industry” and that the whole PC ecosystem had been talking about how to compete with it. But a few sentences later, he was insisting that, actually, the Neo is just a content consumption device that won’t have much of an impact. You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid.

Ultimately, the response of PC makers (and PC operating system makers) to the launch of the MacBook Neo reflects a difference in philosophy at the most fundamental level. Apple’s rivals find it fascinating. They don’t quite understand how it works or how it has achieved what it has, which is why no other company has been able to replicate the Apple formula. But they can’t stop watching. And again and again, they find themselves unable to resist the temptation of making Apple the subject of their own marketing.

Apple, on the other hand, spends its time focusing on itself. It’s aware of other companies and their products, and of course, like all tech companies, it uses the developments and innovations of others to spur on its own work. It acquires other companies and hires their staff. But it views rival products as a starting point: something to surpass, not to imitate. And that’s why the company makes products that are worth imitating, and which customers want to buy without the influence of silly whitepapers.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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