What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?
Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
Lol. There is zero chance the low end mobile phone SoC shipped in those is remotely as fast as a six year old M1. Even flagship SoCs from qualcomm and samsung still do not exceed it's performance yet.
Go look up some benchmarks, the Kompanio Ultra 910 is very comparable in speed to the Apple M1.
It's not really a "low end mobile phone SoC" - it's a Chromebook-specific chip with Cortex-X925 and Cortex-X4 cores.
Cortex-C1-based SoCs are faster but only available in phones to date, which gives them less thermal room.
Anecdotally, I own both an M1 and a Kompanio Ultra 910 device, and they feel subjectively very similar from a performance standpoint.
I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.
Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.
Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.