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Supply Chain

Apple’s Got a Good Problem — and a Chippy One

By Stefano April 11, 2026 5 min read

The MacBook Neo is flying off shelves faster than Apple planned, and now the company is facing a supply crunch of its own making.

Apple built the Neo around binned A18 Pro chips — processors that didn’t quite make the cut for iPhone 16 Pro due to slightly defective GPUs. It was a clever way to repurpose waste and hit an eye-catching $599 entry price. The problem? Analyst Tim Culpan says Apple only planned on making roughly 6 million units using those leftover chips, and demand is blowing past that ceiling.

How we got here

  • The Neo uses A18 Pro chips with 5 working GPU cores — versus 6 in the iPhone 16 Pro — essentially Apple’s b-grade silicon, given a second life.
  • Apple initially targeted ~6M total units to exhaust its binned chip stockpile.
  • Demand is now expected to exceed that, catching Apple and its supply chain partners off guard.

The options on the table

  • Pay TSMC a premium to restart A18 Pro fabrication — possible, but margin-squeezing. This could push the base $599 model off sale, leaving only the $699 version.
  • Accelerate the second-gen Neo, originally slated for mid-2027 using A19 Pro chip leftovers from the iPhone 17 Pro family. Easier said than done.
  • Let stock run dry and wait. The least desirable option — executives don’t love leaving present demand on the table.

Looking ahead… Whatever Apple decides will say a lot about whether “affordable Apple” is a lasting strategy or just a clever one-off chip recycling experiment. The next quarterly earnings call should be very interesting.

S
Author
Stefano