Apple allegedly restarting A18 Pro production to meet MacBook Neo demand

It was just last month that reports began surfacing of Apple having MacBook Neo supply issues. Unsurprisingly, their budget laptop has been incredibly popular with users, leading to Apple running out of the A18 Pro that’s powering them. It now seems that Cupertino has decided to strike the iron while its hot and ramp up production, which includes making more A18 Pro chipsets.

The MacBook Neo was originally designed to make use of the down-binned A18 Pro chipsets that didn’t make it into last year’s iPhone 16 Pro. However, rather than letting them go to waste, Apple instead built the Neo, with their original plan to manufacture between 5 to 6 million of them. According to analyst Tim Culpan, the popularity of the Neo though means that Cupertino is now asking suppliers to help boost capacity for up to 10 million laptops instead.

One main issue stems from the fact that these used effectively free, discarded A18 Pro chipsets. Apple is now looking to ask TSMC for a ‘hot lot’ of A18 Pro chips, fabbed on the TSMC N3E process node. This however means that most of these new A18 Pro chips are actually not down-binned at all; Apple will likely just turn off the sixth GPU core to meet MacBook Neo specs.

Then there’s the question of price. Culpan thinks that there’s a chance TSMC may exempt Apple from its premiums for this A18 Pro run, but it’ll will still be more expensive per chip for Apple, since these are going to be newly fabbed chips rather than discard ones from a previous production run. That’s on top of the increased price of memory too.

One way Apple could bypass that is by simply focusing on the higher priced 512GB MacBook Neo instead. We’ve already seen them do this just recently with the Mac Mini; the RM2,499 Mac Mini with 256GB of storage has been discontinued, with the 512GB Mac Mini becoming the new base model with a RM3,349 starting price.

Read more of our articles below!