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Apple has been using a special processor production strategy for years, allowing the company to sell cheaper devices without wasting chips. It turns out that some of the chips going into new Apple products are processors with disabled cores or slightly reduced performance.
Apple uses what's known as chip binning
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the new MacBook Neo priced at $599 uses the Apple A18 Pro chip, but with a 5-core GPU instead of the full 6 cores available in the iPhone 16 Pro. However, this does not mean there is faulty hardware. It’s a popular method in the industry called chip binning. During the production of processors, some chips do not meet the highest performance or energy efficiency parameters. Instead of discarding such chips, companies disable the weaker cores and use them in cheaper devices.
Apple sells over 200 million iPhones annually, giving the company a huge number of chips to later use in other products. Processors that do not meet the requirements for top models later find their way into cheaper devices such as the MacBook Neo, iPads, Apple TV, or HomePod. According to the report, Apple employs a similar strategy with the iPhone 17 series, where the Air and 17e models are expected to use less powerful versions of chips originally prepared for the more expensive Pro variants.
It benefits both Apple and customers
With this approach, Apple reduces the amount of production waste while maintaining high margins. For users, the differences are usually practically unnoticeable, as even the 'cut-down' versions of the chips still offer very high performance. However, smaller companies often lack the appropriate sales scale to effectively use a similar strategy across multiple product categories.
Apple has been using chip binning for years, which means selling processors with disabled cores in cheaper devices. This way, the company reduces production losses and can offer lower-priced products without creating entirely new chips.
source: digitaltrends
