Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.

The profit margin is probably better than you think. The iPhone 17e sells for the same price, and the neo is certainly less expensive to manufacture.

1) The way to manufacture things cheaply is to do it at scale, and Neo has that in spades.

2) They will generate more profits than the hardware itself. You're not counting services and ecosystem. Now you got a new matching iPhone to go with your Neo, and an iWatch, an iPad, an iPencil...

I suspect they have managed to drive their costs right down and are still maintaining their typical profit margins.

The talk for 20+ years has been about "halo" products - people buying iPods would be introduced to the Mac, same with the iPhone, etc.

I think this may actually be the first real Halo product they have that will do this for Mac, because it is a Mac.

I wonder if this move is to grab customer base as much as they can before the supply chain crunch dents Apple manufacturing for the first time ever