Ask Paul: March 27 ⭐️

Happy Friday! The RAM/component shortage has everyone down, but at least the MacBook Neo is still terrible. Let's kick off the weekend with a bit of angst and dream of a better tomorrow.
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NickTech asks:

Paul, what are your thoughts on the continuing price hikes for SSDs and RAM? Do you think PC makers will just continue to hike prices, or do you see a point where they try to do some sort of “budget” PC tier to try and lock in a lower price? It would be great to have a Snapdragon equivalent of the Macbook Neo for those of us who want to try an ARM based Windows system.

That existed before the MacBook Neo was a gleam in Craig Federighi's eye: In May 2025, HP announced the OmniBook 5 series powered by base-level Snapdragon X chips in both 14- and 16-inch versions. At that time, before the RAM/component prices kicked in, the list prices started at $799, but this is HP, so the real-world prices were starting at about $500. I knew I'd get a 16-inch version as soon as I could, and I did that in July, paying just $579. The 14-inch version was less expensive than that, though I don't recall the price.

There is no such thing as a good $500 laptop, and the MacBook Neo achieves its low price by cutting corners everywhere. The OmniBook starts with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage because it's a Copilot+ PC, and it has all kinds of things the Neo does not, including keyboard backlighting standard, higher resolution displays with multitouch options, consistent USB port capabilities, Windows Hello ESS facial recognition, and whatever else. It's weird to me that this laptop didn't get the press the Neo has as it's superior in every way imagineable. Still is.

Of course, the prices noted above were pre-component shortage. If you look at the 14-inch OmniBook 5 today, you'll see that prices have soared astronomically, to $1049 and up. That's a 50 percent price increase, putting this once affordable laptop into what I would have said a year ago was the premium pricing category. As before, I strongly recommend waiting on sales, which are frequent, and paying attention to refurbished stores (HP and Lenovo both have good ones). But yeah, this is a real problem.

As to what I think will happen, no one wants a Surface Laptop SE-type laptop or its equivalent, and PCs (and Macs) with 8 GB of RAM are toys. So there's no version of Lenovo, HP, or Dell, or any other mainstream PC maker, duplicating the mix of features that Apple put together for the Neo. That's not completely their fault: Apple is a monoculture and the PC market relies on partners, and they're beholden to chipset makers like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm (and, soon, others).

Tied to this, it's weird to me how critical everyone was of Qualcomm following up the Snapdragon X Elite with a series of ever more low-end chips--the Snapdragon X Plus, 8-core Plus, and then just the X--as it now appears they...