- AMD has a new marketing campaign criticizing the MacBook Neo
- The main argument is that the Neo fails as a gaming laptop.
- This is a very confusing angle to take, given that this is not the point of MacBooks – and especially not the budget Neo.
AMD appears to be on the defensive regarding its Windows 11 laptops and the threat posed by Apple’s MacBook Neo.
Tom’s Hardware noticed that AMD has launched a new marketing campaign that aims to take the Neo down a notch or two, instead promoting the benefits of Ryzen AI processors.
AMD insists: “The competition has made compromises. You don’t have to.” He then adds that: “Everything that the MacBook Neo leaves out, integrated into AMD Ryzen AI processors. »
The gist of the compromise message is that the MacBook Neo isn’t up to the task for gaming. AMD notes that 15 of the top 20 PC games don’t run natively on a MacBook Neo and you need “workarounds” (emulation) to play them. The games are selected by Team Red itself, although it’s a pretty fair selection of esports classics and more modern efforts such as Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Black Ops 7.
It’s not just about games, of course, but that’s the main point here. AMD also points out that Windows 11 laptops with its Ryzen AI processors can have touchscreens (which the MacBook Neo doesn’t have) and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Neo’s two USB-C connectors.
AMD then highlights benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 220 against Apple’s A18 processor, as seen in the Neo, where both laptops have 8GB of RAM, but the Ryzen is up to 57% faster at multitasking and 38% faster at content creation, as measured in Blender and Cinebench, among others.
Analysis: confusion over trade-offs
This is really strange, because what a lot of confused people on Reddit have said – echoing my first thought – is: “I didn’t buy a Mac to play games. That’s not really what they’re for.”
Someone else on this thread agrees: “Okay, but no one buys a MacBook for gaming, do they?
And another Reddit user observes: “Imagine if ‘Macs Don’t Play’ was your best thing, lol. I’d fire my marketing team.”
Of course, these people are absolutely right. You don’t buy a MacBook for gaming, and for that matter, you definitely don’t buy a MacBook Neo for PC gaming. This isn’t just an Apple laptop, but a low-end computer with a mobile chip from the ground up designed to be affordable (for students mainly) and capable of handling everyday computing workloads – and that’s it.
Okay, you might want to play casual games, but the MacBook Neo can handle that just fine. What you’re not going to be looking to do on a Neo is play the best PC games, unless you’re very misguided, and okay, a few people probably fall into that category.
So why AMD took the lead with this gaming angle in the marketing of its Ryzen AI laptop, compared to the marketing of the MacBook Neo, is really a head-scratcher. It’s not like the type of Windows 11 laptops AMD uses as a comparison to the Neo, in a similar price range, can run these top PC games very well, anyway.
Of course, AMD has chosen its “best games” very carefully, which goes without saying. But even so, the Radeon 760M’s integrated graphics card (used in the benchmarking) can’t run some of these games with any smoothness, even at low detail (at the Full HD resolution in which the tests were conducted).
The same selection applies to the productivity and creativity criteria, and the problem with the MacBook Neo is that, as we have seen at TechRadar, despite only 8 GB of RAM, it performs smoothly and responsively in everyday tasks. That’s not something you can always say about a Windows 11 laptop with 8GB of RAM in the same price range.
Certainly, Microsoft is working to improve Windows 11 with lower RAM loads, but Apple isn’t standing still either, delivering a considerable performance boost with the recently launched macOS 27 beta.
AMD should have thought more about the positioning of this marketing element, especially since it is the Neo that the company is looking for. The truth is that when it comes to gaming, you shouldn’t expect much from a budget laptop – although what you get from a Windows 11 machine is obviously a better deal, thanks to the mentioned gaming compatibility without the need for emulation tricks.
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