Introducing the MacBook Neo: Apple’s Affordable eMac Alternative

Apple’s new MacBook Neo has taken the laptop market by storm, selling beyond even Apple’s already “bullish” expectations. Last month, we shared reports that it might even be too popular for its own good, and now it appears Apple is being forced to make some tough decisions to keep the supply taps open.

The strategy that allowed Apple to produce and sell the MacBook Neo at such an affordable $599 price tag is turning out to also be its Achilles heel. The new low-cost MacBook broke entirely new ground by using an iPhone chip — the A18 Pro in this case — but that wasn’t simply because M-series chips were more expensive to manufacture. Rather, it was because Apple didn’t have to manufacture new chips at all.

Using the A18 Pro allowed Apple to save a ton of money on production costs because it already had bins full of chips leftover from its iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max production runs. If you’ve read the specs closely, you’ve probably noticed a subtle but important difference between the A18 Pro found in the MacBook Neo and the one that was used in the iPhone 16 Pro models: the MacBook Neo version has one less GPU core.

In the chip industry, this is what’s known as a “binned” chip, and it’s the result of a problem chipmakers have been facing since the early days of silicon: what to do with chips that come off the production line that aren’t quite up to spec. Since they’ll still typically run just fine with lower specs, companies are loathe to waste them, so they’re tossed in a separate “bin” to be used in lesser configurations or even other products. Even Intel’s original Pentium chips in the 1990s suffered from this problem, which is why the company sold both 66 MHz and 60 MHz versions back in the day.

While modern chip fabrication practices no longer require companies to turn down clock speeds, they still result in other limitations, typically requiring a core or two to be sacrificed. It probably wasn’t the first time Apple did this, but the most prominent example was the original M1 chip in the late 2020 MacBook Air, which resulted in an entry-level version with only seven cores.

We also saw this with the iPhone 13 lineup, where the iPhone 13 had fewer GPU cores than the iPhone 13 Pro. It’s unlikely Apple set out to hamper the lower-end model, but when the A15 chips came off the line, it had to find something to do with all the ones that came off the line with a flaky fifth GPU core. Burning out that core and selling them as a four-core version was the most efficient solution, and the fact that it helped set that year’s iPhone Pro model slightly apart was just a nice bonus.

Funneling the Bin into the MacBook Neo

The chip differences in the iPhone 13 lineup seemingly inspired Apple to begin splitting the chips in its standard and pro models entirely, placing the previous year’s “pro” silicon in the current year’s standard model. The iPhone 14 got the full 5-core A15 chip from the iPhone 13 Pro while the iPhone 14 Pro moved on to an A16 Bionic, and then Apple followed that with an A16 Bionic in the iPhone 15 and a newer and much more powerful A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro.

However, this also left Apple with a dilemma of what to do with the “binned” versions of those higher-end chips, especially after it moved into A-series standard and pro families with the iPhone 16 lineup. Leftover “binned” versions of the A17 Pro found a home in the 2024 iPad mini, but around the same time, Apple also undoubtedly began accumulating bins of A18 Pro chips it couldn’t use in the iPhone 16 Pro.

So, when Apple set out to create the most affordable MacBook it’s ever made, it had a ready supply of A18 Pro chips available without needing to spin up a single new fabrication line. It simply opened up that bin and began funnelling those chips into the MacBook Neo assembly line.

We may never know what Apple’s long-term strategy for this was, but many analysts suggest the company believed it had enough A18 Pro chips in the bin to meet MacBook Neo demand. That must have been a lot, since Tim Cook said during Apple’s recent Q2 2026 earnings call that the company was “very bullish” on what the demand would be — and yet it seems that the demand is much higher than even that.

In mid-April, analysts well-connected to the chipmaking world suggested that Apple could soon be forced to ramp up production of new A18 Pro chips, “killing the sweet profit margins it enjoyed on making a device with ‘effectively free’ chips,” as Culpium’s Tim Culpan said.

Now, Culpan has followed that up with a report that Apple is getting ready to fire up the A18 Pro lines again as it asked suppliers to crank out 10 million more units — nearly twice as much as it initially estimated.

Interestingly, Culpan also points out that since Apple never deliberately produced a five-core version of the A18 Pro — these were simply defective six-core chips — it would actually end up with higher-performance yields coming off the line.