I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.
There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
> and to never do anything that other people than the owner want
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.
The purpose of an OS is to run applications. Windows and MacOS have the applications people want or need to run.
Other OSes can run the browser, which runs many of the applications you want.
So? Acer also makes Chromebooks.