When I first had heard that the MacBook Neo would have the A18 Pro chip from last year’s iPhone 16 Pro, I theorized part of their reasoning was that Apple didn’t want to end up cannibalizing the sales of their iPhone 17 Pro with this year’s chip. With two products using the same chip set, they’d double demand for a product that is likely already at maximum production capacity. It seems my bet was accurate, because Apple’s running out of chips for the MacBook Neo.
No wonder it’s so hard to get one right now.
I ended up taking too long to decide whether or not to buy a MacBook Neo. By the time I could get my preorder, it was two weeks after the launch date. For a tech reviewer, that’s agonizing. But the truth is, it would have been a day one buy with the 12GB of RAM and power of the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro. It was that binned older processor that held me back.
While the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo hasn’t kept demand down, it has lead to a new problem: Apple can’t make enough of their older chips, especially with the binned processor. Apple just can’t keep up with demand, and current rumors state that next year’s MacBook Neo may be a no-brainer purchase.
High Demand, High Quality
The iPhone 16 Pro had a more powerful processor than the new MacBook Neo. That’s a hard pill to swallow. A Mac is less powerful than a one-year-old iPhone. This is because, while they use the same chip, the chip in the MacBook Neo is “binned.” These are chips with defects in their manufacturing that forces the company to disable a core on the chip. Chip manufacturers have been doing this for many years. Often the less powerful version of a chip in any generation is just a binned version of the more powerful chip that would have otherwise been thrown away. In the case of the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo, one of the GPU cores has been turned off, giving the chip just five GPU cores instead of the six in the iPhone 16 Pro. The difference in performance should be negligible, but it’s certainly something you could spot in more intense gaming sessions.
The problem with using chips that have defects is you can only estimate how many you’ll have on hand. It’s not as though Apple intentionally churns out defective chips. Unless you start artificially shutting chip cores down, you can’t be sure of how many will have flaws that require just one core in the chip being turned off. On top of that, chip manufacturers can only make so many chips in general, and Apple still sells the iPhone 16, which, while not the exact same chip, could interfere with production. This is Apple’s only product right now with an A18 Pro, and with Apple working their way through the binned stock, it wouldn’t be surprising if they just bump the performance slightly in a few months. Apple may not want to make early adopters feel cheated, but most early adopters know that’s the nature of the game.
Where to Get a MacBook Neo Now
Right now, if you try to order a MacBook Neo on Apple’s website, you’ll need to weeks for it to be delivered. It came out a month ago, and is still delayed by two weeks. All colors, even the less popular silver color, and all storage options, delayed by two weeks.
If you want one now, you’ll have to get it from a third party site. Right now, Amazon has them available with two day shipping. Best Buy can get it in your hands the day you order it. Even Costco offers faster shipping than Apple. If you use a third party retailer, you’ll likely be able to get your MacBook Neo faster. That’s your best bet if you need one the same day you buy it.
Improvements Coming Next Year
I don’t know why Apple wouldn’t improve the MacBook Neo next year. They do tend to improve some of their budget devices on a two to three year cycle, such as the now 2-year-old iPad mini 7, but with this featuring an older iPhone chip, it may be important for Apple to update it more quickly to use the stock from their binned A19 Pro chips. It would also give them a chance to release the most popular laptop of the year. A MacBook Neo with just a little more memory would be perfect.
Current rumors, shaky this long before an update, claim that the next MacBook Neo will fix the largest issue with the current one: memory. The current MacBook Neo has only 8GB of memory. It’s a joke, phones have more memory, and this computer should too (I would know, I’m writing this article from one). The next MacBook Neo will supposedly feature an A19 Pro processor with 12GB of memory. That’s a far more reasonable amount of memory. While 12GB is still less than I’d prefer, it’s a reasonable amount of memory for macOS. When I’m working, writing software, I’m often using more than 32GB of memory. But, for writing tasks, such as this blog, I can get by with a lot less. I’m still upset I can’t even run Glaze on my MacBook Neo due to it taking over 6 hours to disguise a small image from AI. Nightshade, built on top of Glaze, also obviously doesn’t work well due to the same memory constraints.
Should You Buy Now or Later?
I bought a MacBook Neo. I’ve been busy and haven’t been able to run it through all the paces I want, but I’ve been writing articles on it and doing some light gaming on it. It’s surprisingly capable for what it is. It’s a cheap MacBook that performs like a cheap MacBook. I got what it says on the box. I frequently use mine much like I would use my 2019 MacBook Pro, which is a more capable machine, sure, but it also cost almost ten times as much as this. Largely it struggles with tasks that use a large amount of memory on its own, but swap is fast. I’ll have a dozen Firefox tabs open, iA Writer, and only notice some stuttering when switching to other memory-intensive apps or games.
Basically, if you want a MacBook Neo now, get one now. It’ll be perfectly capable and last you a solid 2 years before you’ll want an upgrade. The greatest shame about this device isn’t that it will be replaced by a far more capable model next year, it’s that upgrading this to be a far more capable computer would be so easy. The device is highly reparable. I’m willing to bet that Apple could easily make the next model compatible with a part swap from this one, meaning you could get the new motherboard instead of replacing the entire computer. Some hardware hackers have even upgraded the storage space in the Neo to 1TB already. There’s more this machine could do. If Apple made a SOC swap possible, they’d be the greatest champion for the environment in big tech. Unfortunately, they’re far from that.
The 2027 or 2028 MacBook Neo will likely have a far more capable 12GB of RAM. If you need a laptop now and you’re worried about that, worry about it in a year and swap your MacBook Neo for the new one then. Demand will likely still be high and with so many of the parts recyclable, I’m sure Apple won’t put it all to waste.
It’s just a shame they won’t let us do the 5 minute swap job instead. I’d hate to have to remove all the band stickers I put on my MacBook Neo already.
Sources:
- Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac
- Chance Miller, 9to5Mac
- Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider
- Joe Rossignol, MacRumors, 2