Are the days of the $599 MacBook Neo numbered?

apple kill off the mac mini baseline, Raising the entry price for the cheapest desktops from $599 to $799. Could it make a similar move with its cheapest laptop?

In his country Colbium Newsletter, Tim Colpin reports Apple is preparing a new production process for MacBook Neoincreasing the number of units to 10 million from an estimated initial run of between 5 and 6 million. After it exhausted its supply of remaining A18 Pro processors iPhone 16 ProApple will need to manufacture a new set of A18 Pro chips for these new devices.

The cost of producing new chips rather than just dipping into existing supplies of “discarded” parts will cut into Neo’s profit margins. Faced with razor-thin profit margins, Apple could stop selling the $599 model, Colpin says, and position the $699 MacBook Neo as an entry point.

New summary

Let’s review and summarize the situation Apple finds itself in with the MacBook Neo.

The MacBook Neo was released in March and was an instant hit. “We were very optimistic about the product before announcing it, but we underestimated the level of enthusiasm that would accompany it,” CEO Tim Cook said last week. Apple’s Q2 earnings call.

With the Neos flying onto store shelves, Apple is putting its Neos supplies to work faster than it expected. Since next year’s update is a long way from meeting demand for the Neo, it needs to put more effort into the current model. This requires Apple to spend money making millions of A18 Pro chips, a cost it did not incur for the initial supply of the Neos.

At the heart of the MacBook Neo are discarded versions of the A18 Pro chip that Apple made for the iPhone 16 Pro. These deleted chips have a minor manufacturing flaw in one of the six integrated graphics cores and were not used in the iPhone 16 Pro. (That’s why the MacBook Neo is listed as having five GPU cores, while the iPhone 16 Pro has six.)

Faced with rising manufacturing costs for this second round of Neos, Apple may not like the math it’s seeing for the $599 base model that students can get for $499 with Apple’s education discount — especially when you also factor in the rising costs of computer memory and storage.

Goodbye $599 Neo?

One move available to Apple, which it has already made with the Mac Mini, is to remove the less expensive 256GB model that has the lowest profit margins. Such a gambit with the Neo would leave the $699 model with a 512GB SSD and Touch ID as the only option (unless, say, Apple adds a 1TB model on top of it).

And before you start thinking about waiting for a MacBook Neo with a new A18 Pro chip that might offer a slight increase in graphics performance, it is unlikely that Apple will offer it with six functional GPUs. To keep things balanced, Apple will likely discontinue one of the GPUs, so a Neo purchased today or later this year will have the same six-core CPU and five-core GPU.

One item you might be willing to wait for: new colors. Colbin hypothesizes that Apple could introduce new color options for the Neo in an attempt to assuage any hard feelings about raising the entry cost of the Neo.

I’ve already gone on record as saying that students should look at Apple’s $100 discount as a free upgrade to Touch ID and double the storage, so I wouldn’t be too upset to see the end of the $599 Neo with its meager amount of storage and no Touch ID. But I’m sure there are many students and teachers who would lament its demise, new colors or not.