PieFedApple is Reportedly Facing a 'Massive Dilemma' With the MacBook Neo
Sundraywww.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massiv…
In the iPhone 16 Pro models, the A18 Pro chip has a 6-core GPU. During the chip manufacturing process, however, sometimes a CPU or GPU core can turn out to be faulty. Rather than discarding the leftover A18 Pro chips with only a 5-core GPU, Apple opted to use them in the MacBook Neo, as a way of optimizing its supply chain and costs.
These so-called “binned” chips with a 5-core GPU are effectively “free” to Apple, given that they otherwise would have been discarded.
Herein lies the dilemma.
In the latest edition of his Culpium newsletter today, Culpan said the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple’s supply of the binned A18 Pro chips with a 5-core GPU will “run out” before the company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop.
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It is quite usual for yields to go up and defective chips to be replaced with purposefully disabled chips.
Binning has been a thing forever. Apple isn’t new in selling processors that are technically nerfed versions of better ones. It’s not shady either – the chips were binned exactly because they were tested.
What I find more interesting is that Apple is also dealing with what happened on the PC side a while ago: processors get so fast that the differences between mid-range and high-end don’t really show up in typical day-to-day workflows. Apple is right to think that this gives them a chance to gain market share by selling a Mac which is significantly cheaper, but to what effect? Apple hardware has been the expensive option for a long time, and one could argue that a lot of brand identity is tied up in high prices, because people perceive “most expensive” as “the best”. I can’t think of a brand on the PC side which has been happy to stay at the top of the price range for so long.
So a cheap Mac is decidedly off-brand for Apple. Will people spend thousands extra for a machine that feels mostly the same for everyday workloads?
The Neo is the gateway drug into the ecosystem. For people who have only ever known Windows, MacOS will probably blow a lot of minds with how superior it is. Then Apple has a new customer who will want everything Apple from now on. Maybe not every time, but I would wager the majority of times, they’ll have new converts.
This used to be the logic behind the iPod. In fact, it was referred to as the “iPod halo effect”. So I would not be surprised if that is a key reason for the pricing.
@circuitfarmer It’s also a good time to go back to selling Macs with only 8 gb of ram, given supply constraints. Can’t really walk back the minimum amount of ram in an existing line (although they have reduced the maximum at least in the case of the Studio, which is bad enough)
The RAM is probably the biggest issue with the Neo, and Apple might be banking on that as the thing that keeps people paying more for other systems. I can’t imagine using 8GB RAM in 2026, tbh, but again, it all comes down to workflows.
It’s called suffering from success, and Apple, more than most companies, has a lot of experience with it.
The usual path (something every chipmaker does) is to just disable the ‘extra’ cores.
They could also sell higher spec’d Neos, but that would never happen before the midrange macbooks are refreshed because it would mess up Apple’s very carefully formulated pricing strategy
Oh no! Not spending money!
Oh no! More sales than expected but with slightly less margin than the first batch!
I suppose its a good thing there are 1.5 million iPhone Air units that went unsold that use a A19 5 core CPU. Even better, iPhone Air had 12GB RAM onboard. With unsold product and current RAM drought, this would be a good way to turn unsold product into something consumers really want.
Here’s a reference on the iPhone air internals from Jan 2026:
“Possibly the biggest hurt could be with the chips. Apple uses the same A19 Pro CPU in the Air as it does with the iPhone 17 Pro. But the Air has only 5 GPU cores — as does the base iPhone 17 — while the iPhone 17 Pro has 6 GPU cores. (To be blunt, this is merely chip binning, not a new chip).”
“As a result, the unused Air chips cannot be put in the the lower-end base iPhone 17 nor in the higher-end iPhone 17 Pro. They cannot be repurposed. Even worse, the Air has 12GB of DRAM while the baseline iPhone 17 has just 8GB, according to TrendForce. So, any processor modules which have already had their DRAM fused onto the CPU would also result in wasted DRAM — unless Apple and TSMC find some magical way to “unfuse” the memory from the base die.”
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Brilliant
Played with a Neo at the Apple Store. It was far better than I was expecting. Loaded the 150mb sample image in affinity photo and it chewed through it no problem. Very snappy.
I was about to say it’s not powerful enough to be my daily laptop but it probably is. I like my MBP more but not sure if $2000 more.
I have a mini on my desk at work and it’s awesome. Driving 3 displays without missing a beat.
I wonder what the hypothetical ‘6 GPU core Neo’ would be like
Dangerously closer to that of a MacBook Air?
To an M5? I doubt it.
Closer, not close
Nobody would notice. They could write software in the drivers that says if A18 then max gpu cores = 5. They probably are already.
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/AAPL/balance-sheet/cash-and-short-term-investments
I’m sure some choice individuals could get that other core to work if it came to that.
Yeah, it seems petty to punish people for not being among the first to buy the Neo. That extra GPU core would not be a selling point. The fact that the MacBook Neo, with its binned A18 Pro, can play Cyberpunk, but my iPhone 16 Pro Max, with a regular A18 Pro, cannot, is already an advantage over my phone which cost over twice as much.
It’s worth noting at this point that phones not having AAA games is down to developers. Any game on the Switch 1 can run on your iPhone if your iPhone gets major updates. Any game on the Switch 2 can run on newer iPhones. Because those games were coded for ARM64. The only reason we don’t have Skyrim on the iPhone is because Bethesda hasn’t put it in the App Store. They already did the work. But they decided people wouldn’t pay $60 for a phone game. So they transitioned it into a free-to-play piece of shit called The Elder Scrolls: Blades and nobody liked it. They can let Skyrim go on sale for $10-20 on Steam and the Switch store, but they can’t swallow their pride and drop it on the App Store for $20? The game is 15 years old. But they’ve already done the work. This idea that you need an Xbox, a PlayStation, or a “gaming PC” to play AAA games is a farce. Even if you have a recent Android phone, you have the necessary performance. Phones running both platforms have had desktop performance for years now.
While it might be petty, disabling cores isn’t punishing the second wave of buyers. It’s making the second wave match the first it terms of specs.
Meanwhile, Warframe is a free game that run just fine on most any current iPhone, but they won’t release it on Mac even though the iOS beta ran great on an M1 Mini.
It’s a nice problem to have. To have too much demand and not enough supply. One solution is to raise the price, which would push a lot more people up to the MacBook Air. If I were an Apple investor, that would benefit me. I’m not, so I just hope they don’t do it. As a proud Mac user, I’m happy to see more people get on the platform. I genuinely think it’s a better place to be than Windows, with the exception that ARM64, while being more power efficient (a boon for laptops), is still not a popular platform for desktop. Mine is fine (M2 Pro, 16GB, 512GB SSD) but I don’t represent every use case. And Mac is almost a total wash for gaming (except for Switch 1 emulation, where it excels; and for classic console emulation, which any computer can do). If you don’t care about gaming, or you have an Xbox/whatever for gaming… it’s a good place to be if you need a new computer.
I thought the point of this was to be a budget product?
apple selling garbage? wheres the news? /s
wait. so this laptop is weaker than the smartphone?
Yes. It’s also cheaper
“iT jUsT wOrKs”