The MacBook Neo was such a smash hit for Apple that it may soon be subject to a price hike
The $599 MacBook Neo has been flying off shelves and online stores so fast that Apple has been forced to double its production goal. Even now, as I write this article, the shipping time on the official website is two to three weeks.
Semiconductor analyst Tim Culpan of Culpium says that Apple has asked its manufacturing partners, Quanta and Foxconn, to increase production capacity to 10 million units, almost double the initial estimate. However, the increase in production may cause a price crisis for consumers in the near future.
How does an increase in production cause a price crisis?
According to Culpan, Apple cleverly recycled the A18 Pro chips, which were rejected during the production of the iPhone 16 Pro, and used them as a “bound” version with one of the six disabled GPUs.
These chips were efficient, except for one GPU core, so Apple didn’t have to incur high costs. However, the iPhone 16 Pro is no longer in production, and so is the A18 Pro chip.
The company is reported to have spent the entire amount of A18 Pro that it had. To keep up with demand, it has to order a new batch of A18 Pro chips directly from TSMC, “top-tier” versions no less.
As is the case with chip manufacturing, most chips will include six core GPUs, and only some will “fall into the downbin category.” Because of this, the company may end up paying the full price, as well as the premium, driven by increased demand for TSMC’s 3nm chips and the DRAM crisis.
Could Apple kill the $599 model instead of raising prices?
Taken together, all these factors could push the production of the MacBook Neo more expensive than when it was launched, and the Cupertino giant could pass on the premium to consumers.
Now, there’s a chance that Apple might kill the base $599 MacBook Neo (256GB) altogether, rather than raising prices across the board, something the company did with the Mac mini recently.
The way I see this is that the education price of the 256GB MacBook Neo – $499 – would be a very difficult thing for Apple to achieve, especially while incurring high production costs. The $699 MacBook Neo (512GB), available for $599 as part of an education plan, may put Apple in a more comfortable position.
On the other hand, I also believe that Apple must have a large supply of A19 Pro chips at the moment, and possibly defective ones, with one GPU core not working. Therefore, if the company does not want to order a chip with a year (since there is no iPhone in production that uses it), there is a real possibility that the next batch of MacBook Neo will come with a limited version of the A19 Pro chip.
Think of it this way: the new MacBook Neo with the A19 Pro chip with more processing power, starting at $699 for the 512GB variant, also available for $599 at educational prices. That makes sense to me.
