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Apple has been using a special strategy for manufacturing processors for years, which allows the company to sell cheaper devices without wasting integrated circuits. It turns out that some of the chips going into new Apple products are processors with disabled cores or slightly reduced performance.
Apple uses so-called chip binning
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the new MacBook Neo for $599 features 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 the hardware is damaged. It is a common method in the industry known as 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 deactivate the weaker cores and use them in cheaper devices.
Apple sells over 200 million iPhones annually, which gives the company a huge number of chips that can later be used in other products. Processors that do not meet the requirements for top models later end up in cheaper devices such as the MacBook Neo, iPads, ChooseTV or HomePod. According to the report, a similar strategy is also employed by Apple for the iPhone 17 series, where the Air and 17e models are expected to use less efficient versions of chips originally prepared for the more expensive Pro variants.
It is beneficial for 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 "stripped-down" versions of chips still offer very high performance. However, smaller companies often do not have the appropriate sales scale to effectively utilise a similar strategy across multiple product categories.
Apple has been using chip binning for years, which involves selling processors with disabled cores in cheaper devices. This way, the company reduces production losses and can offer cheaper products without creating entirely new chips.
source: digitaltrends
