[mschuster91]

Efficiencies of scale and experience, on multiple levels.

Component sourcing is the most obvious thing - Apple is known to buy up inventory years in advance for example and at insane quantities. TSMC's last new node? Apple paid billions to be the initial and, most importantly, exclusive customer. With hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and liquid assets, Apple can afford to sit on "dead money" for years - a small shop like Framework can't.

As for the Neo specifically, this thing shouldn't even exist, but Apple found themselves sitting on a stash of half defective iPhone SoCs. But instead of trashing them, they effectively recreated the netbook market segment...

[LarsDu88]

The MacBook Neo is just the response to the question of "what do we do with all these binned iPhone chips without making yet another even lower cost iPhone?"

It's literally recycling Apple's garbage.

[dd8601fn]

> It's literally recycling Apple's garbage.

…and still blows the doors off anything in its market.