If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.
I'd expect it to be. In fact, I'd demand it.
(I'm ignoring the "old model, found cheaply" bit because that's entirely irrelevant. You can find old Macs on sale around, too, but that doesn't mean you can reasonably compare them to the MSRP of a brand new device.)
[0]https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/
[1]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-...
No, I'm not: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
And I still stand behind the fact that, for that price, you've got a very competent device that is better specced for light use and friendlier for mom and pop (look, it has a HDMI, you can straight up connect it to the telly! Look, it has USB A ports, so that old camera, hard drive with the family pictures, old weird ergo mouse just works out of the box !).
But for giggles, let’s look at the old PC.
Despite being heavier, wider, taller, thicker, slower, dimmer, lower resolution, hotter, older, and having less battery life, it is, indeed, $20 cheaper.
Put another way, there’s no way on earth I’d pick that over a MacBook Neo to save $20 at the cost of having a worse laptop in almost every way.
TBH, if I imagined I was the median casual user, I would also take the $20 marginal cost for the Neo. "Worse in almost every way" just depends on how you weight each individual parameter, which for me, is quite atypical.
Of course, old Macs should factor into that too. Also, it's a different story if I do want something brand new.
If we want to compare new vs used, then how much would you have to spend to buy a brand new PC laptop as powerful as last year’s MacBook Pro?
You can literally open up every app (50+) on it and simultaneously edit 4k video without issues. It handles all of the pro apps really well. So it objectively can handle light web browsing just fine.