- I don't think you're correct about the gulf in single core performance. On battery, the Cinebench 2024 scores (single core) of the Ryzen 7 AI 350 are 97% of the score you get from an M4 MacBook Air. (Cinebench is a lot better than GeekBench, IMO).
- Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. I.e., if I have a 10 inch 8K screen that’s not really “more screen real estate” than a 27” 4K screen in practice. So the real question is whether the $500-800 user is a pixel hunter and loves smoother text at the expense of other purchase factors. IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K)
- Yoga 7 video playback on battery actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours.
- Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that coming slightly behind the MacBook Air:
You might prefer a different benchmark, but I am correct in the gulf on geekbench. I just looked at their benchmark results. For what it's worth, Geekbench is a lot better than Cinebench IMO, because it's more "real world".
> IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling
That is not my experience. I have run MacOS on monitors ranging from 43" down to 23", in various resolutions. MacOS looks great to me.
> 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant
Well, it's 15% heavier. Whether that's significant is up to the carrier.
- It has ~1.5x the screen real-estate (2408x1506 vs 1920x1200)
- The CPU is (3566,8646) compared to the AMD (2366,9243) on geek bench. Single core (the most important) is ~1.5x faster
- PC's battery life is 8-10 hours real-world (rather than quoted "up to 13"), Toms Hardware benchmarked the Neo at 13.5
- Neo is slightly lighter at 2.7 vs ~3.1 lbs.
There are other reasons to go with the AMD version, larger storage, touchscreen if that's your thing, some people might even like Windows 11.
But the Neo is still going to be a runaway hit.