Made me buy a MacBook Air instead. Waited for a long time because I was not a fan of macOS, but Apple is quite cheap in all segments nowadays. A well-specced MacBook Pro these days is cheaper than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The MacBook Air at ~$1000 price point with 16GB/512GB is also incredibly hard to beat in price, and even if you pay the premium for a Windows competitor (crazy sentence) you actually get a less than premium experience: worse build quality, worse display, worse battery life.

Apple's chip count in their laptops is insanely low compared to the competition. They're reaping the rewards of their continued investment in simplicity. People are appalled that they don't use standard M.2 storage; Apple's thing is bespoke and incompatible. Evil Apple's trying to prevent us folks from upgrading our laptops!!

Nope. They use standard chips without a dedicated controller, because it's all controlled directly on the M-series chip, saving them a bunch of money. Which that, with the Macbook Neo, they absolutely pass the savings down to you.