Apple’s $600 MacBook Neo is landing in a market that is already getting tighter by the week. The new laptop, released in early March with 8GB of RAM and Apple’s unified memory architecture, is drawing a sharp reaction from PC rivals as memory prices rise and supply gets pulled toward artificial intelligence customers.
ASUS chief financial officer Nick Wu called the MacBook Neo “a shock to the entire market,” and said all PC vendors, including upstream vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, were taking it very seriously. He said ASUS would need more time before it could ready a response. That matters because the Neo’s $600 price point is not just a new Apple entry level; it is a direct challenge to Windows laptops that have spent the last year moving toward bigger memory and storage bundles.
The pressure on the market is coming from a global supply base that is far less flexible than buyers might expect. SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron make more than 90 percent of the world’s memory chips, and those companies are shifting more production toward AI demand. Micron said at the end of last year that it would end its consumer-facing business to focus on providing RAM and other components to AI customers. In January, The reported that data centers would consume 70 percent of the high-end memory produced in 2026.
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Prices have already moved sharply. Counterpoint Research said memory costs rose 50 percent in the final quarter of 2025 and predicted they would climb another 40 to 50 percent before the end of the current quarter. The company’s warning lands alongside a separate alert from TrendForce, which said in December that most major PC manufacturers were either considering or already planning price hikes. This month, TrendForce said laptop prices could rise as much as 40 percent if makers and retailers move to protect their margins.
For Apple, the MacBook Neo is a product of more than a decade spent designing its own chips, which lets it use unified memory shared between the A18 Pro’s CPU and GPU in a way that differs from traditional Windows PCs. Microsoft has already mandated 16GB of RAM and 256GB of solid-state storage for PCs in a program that began in 2024, a sign of how far the baseline has shifted across the industry.
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The contradiction in the market is hard to miss. Apple is selling a low-cost laptop with 8GB of RAM just as the rest of the PC world is being pushed toward pricier configurations by memory shortages and AI demand. The result could be a wider split: Apple keeps pressing the entry-level market, while Windows OEMs may need a year or more before they can match the response. SK Hynix’s chief executive has warned the shortages could last until 2030, which suggests the squeeze around memory — and the pricing pressure that comes with it — is not fading soon.
