Comment by tristanj

Macbook Neo is manufactured with leftover / binned A18 Pro iPhone chips, these chips have a defective GPU Core and Apple was sitting on millions of these. Apple does not have an easy way to dispose of these chips, the base iPads use 2 generations old A16 chips & the iPad pros use M series chips. So they created a new product line.

The Macbook Neo is cheap because the CPU/GPU/Memory chip is sold below cost. The Neo line exists to dispose of / repurpose binned A18 Pro chips and when these run out Apple will significantly raise prices.

This is the identical situation to what happened with the original Raspberry Pi, the Pi company acquired leftover Broadcom BCM2835 chips for almost nothing, and were able to sell Raspberry Pis for an impossibly cheap price of $35.