HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".
Moore's Law is coming to an end. The Macbook Neo says "why choose?"
Nobody needs a laptop with a 40 hour battery life. Nor does anybody needs 200 cpu threads and an AI coprocessor and 256Gb of RAM and 8Tb of SSD. So we're finally seeing the sweet spot in the phase diagram drift inexorably towards the corner labelled "cheap".
The lack of RAM really will be a disadvantage in the next few years.
If they could have sold it with 16 or 24 GBytes then it would be an easy recommendation for a "good enough"¹ laptop for many people.
If Apple can't make that happen, then it's probably not economic, or they are engineering for rapid obsolescence and enhanced shareholder value.
The used market should be buoyant though as people upgrade to more balanced specification laptops.
Alternatively someone might come up with a replacement motherboard that fits in the Neo chassis as a drop in replacement 😉
¹ Good enough in the Jerry Pournelle sense of that phrase.
Charlie Stross
Simon Zerafa (Status: 
😊)