Crystal ball: Let’s be clear upfront: there is no Mac Neo desktop. No leak, no supply chain [rumour], no analyst note. What follows is conjecture – but conjecture worth taking seriously, because the pieces are sitting right there on Apple’s workbench.
Apple is big enough they could definitely do a $300 box if they wanted to
They wouldn’t get their usual margin perhaps, but remember the neo macbooks are primarily a way of them using up a large number of processors that otherwise don’t have a product to go in, created as a side effect of their main product line.
Mac desktop users (and frankly, many average consumers) don’t seem to care about flexibility, because they already have the fairly successful mini and studio desktop lines which have very little flexibility out of the factory compared to a regular desktop.
I can definitely see schools and offices wanting to take them up on a cheap desktop, so it’s not like the volume of sales isn’t there. I think the main thing stopping it, based on some of the reports following the MacBook neo launch, is they might not have enough of the dud iPhone chips to meet demand. Of course, spinning up a whole manufacturing run to make chips for Neo machines defeats the entire purpose of them existing in the first place, so maybe they wouldn’t want to stretch the resource by asking more SKUs that use it.