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.
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?