With how apple seemed to be caught by surprise when it came to Macbook Neo demand, I'm not sure they have the quantities of SoC's around to handle the demand a Mini Neo could drive. Especially if they could do it for $299.

I will go out on a limb and say that's not going to be an Apple product, period. It doesn't fit anywhere in the value envelope.

The relevant questions here are: will the person using this machine also conceivably be wearing a pair of $549 AirPod Max? Or a $399 base Apple Watch? Does that person expect to pay more or less for their largest-screen computing device than their headphones?

Framing that way points toward a $350 price point being a laptop for young children (younger than Apple Watch age, so lower elementary). That's a whole different software experience beyond just the hardware.

Apart from the ports, that’s roughly the AppleTV hardware. A macOS or Linux port to that would be a cute thin client. Not gonna happen, but cute.

A Pi running macOS more or less. Not dissing it though. Killer machine for those who don’t need a lot of power locally. Also a great kiosk for some things.