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Apple has been using a special chip production strategy 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 utilizes 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 indicate defective hardware. It is a common industry method known as chip binning. During the production of processors, some chips do not achieve 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 that can later be used in other products. Processors that do not meet the requirements for top models are then used in cheaper devices such as the MacBook Neo, iPads, Apple TV, or HomePod. According to the report, Apple employs a similar strategy 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.
This 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 virtually unnoticeable, as even "stripped-down" versions of chips still offer very high performance. However, smaller companies often lack the appropriate sales scale to effectively utilize a similar strategy across many product categories.
Apple has been using chip binning for years, which involves selling processors with disabled cores in cheaper devices. This allows the company to reduce production losses and offer less expensive products without creating entirely new chipsets.
source: digitaltrends
