The $599 MacBook Neo has been flying off the shelves and online stores so fast that Apple has been forced to double its production target. Even now, when I’m writing this article, the shipping time on the official website is two to three weeks.
Semiconductor analyst Tim Culpan of Culpium claims that Apple has asked its manufacturing partners, Quanta and Foxconn, to increase the production capacity to 10 million units, nearly double the initial estimate. However, increasing production could cause a price problem for buyers very soon.
How does increasing production cause a price problem?
According to Culpan, Apple cleverly repurposed the A18 Pro chips, rejected during the iPhone 16 Pro production, and used them as a “binned” version with one of the six GPU cores disabled.
These chips were perfectly working, except for one GPU core, and hence, Apple didn’t have to incur high costs for them. However, the iPhone 16 Pro is no longer in production, and neither is the A18 Pro chip.
The company has reportedly depleted the binned A18 Pro inventory it had. To keep up with the demand, it must order a fresh batch of A18 Pro chips directly from TSMC, the “top-tier” versions no less.
As is the case with chip manufacturing, most of the chips would feature a functional six-core GPU, and only some “would fall into the downbin category.” As a result, the company might end up paying the full price, along with a premium, driven by the increase in demand for TSMC’s 3nm chips and the DRAM crisis.
Could Apple kill the $599 model instead of raising prices?
Combined, all these factors could push the MacBook Neo’s production cost higher than when it launched, and the Cupertino giant might pass the premium to buyers.
Now, there is a chance that Apple might kill the baseline $599 MacBook Neo (256GB) entirely, rather than increasing the prices across the board, something the company did with the Mac mini recently.
How I see this is that the education pricing of the 256GB MacBook Neo — $499 — could be something very difficult for Apple to achieve, especially while incurring higher production costs. A $699 MacBook Neo (512GB), available at $599 as part of the education program, might put Apple in a more comfortable space.
On the flip side, I also believe that Apple must have an abundant supply of the A19 Pro chips at the moment, and possibly the defective ones as well, with one GPU core not working. So, if the company doesn’t want to order a year-old chip (as there’s no iPhone in production that’s using it), there could be a very real chance that the next batch of MacBook Neo arrives with a binned version of the A19 Pro chip.
Think of it this way: a new MacBook Neo with the A19 Pro chip with more processing power, starting at $699 for the 512GB variant, also available at $599 with the education pricing. That makes more sense to me.