I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro. I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?
MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
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Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#12I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro. I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#13It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#14It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#15Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#16I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro. I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro. The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
> The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#17It was not the normal Apple Mac Pricing to begin with. But let see if they will stick to $599 next year when it comes with 12GB RAM and hopefully double the SSD speed. I wouldn't be surprised it would have similar sales if it was priced $699. It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the deman…
> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#18I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses. It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seem…
The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#19I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro. I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?
Leaving money on the table, as opposed to losing it. They make a decent buck on the hardware, but could have charged more (though likely would have sold fewer units).
Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
#20I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro. I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?
actually i am thankful that microslop is losing more than apple. They could've made better OS than macos by not adding candy crush or copilot slop.