Apple dropped the MacBook Neo on March 4, 2026, priced at $599 — the cheapest Mac laptop ever — and everyone immediately noticed something weird. The chip inside it was the A18 Pro. The exact same chip from the iPhone 16 Pro. Not a Mac chip. An iPhone chip. In a laptop.
People went a bit crazy about this on social media. “It’s a phone chip! It’s not a real Mac!” Some tech YouTubers made it sound like Apple had basically insulted their customers. But the more you look at it, the more you realize most of that reaction was based on a misunderstanding of how Apple Silicon actually works. The A chip and M chip are not as different as people think. And in some ways, the whole debate reveals something really interesting about where Apple is taking computing.
So. Let’s actually look at what these chips are, how they differ, and why any of this matters.
The A Chip and M Chip Are Basically Cousins
The A series — like the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro — is Apple’s iPhone chip line. The M series — M4, M5 — is what goes into MacBooks, iPads, and the Mac mini. Most people assume these are two completely different chips. They are not.
Both the A18 Pro and M4 are built on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, called N3E. Both are based on ARMv9.2-A architecture. Both use Apple’s custom Everest performance cores and Sawtooth efficiency cores. Both have a 16-core Neural Engine rated at 35 TOPS. When you run benchmarks and normalize by clock speed, you get roughly 857 points per GHz for both chips. The IPC — instructions per clock — is essentially identical.
If Apple had just called the A18 Pro the “M4 Lite” and put it in the MacBook Neo, nobody would have said anything. The outrage was mostly about the name.
Where they actually differ is at the system level. The M4 has 10 CPU cores versus the A18 Pro’s 6. The M4 has a 10-core GPU versus the A18 Pro’s 6 cores (and the MacBook Neo actually gets a 5-core version — more on that in a second). The M4 supports up to 120 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The A18 Pro maxes out at 60 GB/s. That’s the one difference that actually matters for real work.
More CPU cores means the M4 handles multi-threaded work — like exporting a video or compiling code — much faster. Double the memory bandwidth means pro creative tasks don’t hit a bottleneck as quickly. For most normal people doing normal things — browsing, writing, watching YouTube, light photo editing — you probably can’t tell the difference in daily use.
The “Binned Chip” Story Is Actually Fascinating
Here’s a detail that most coverage glossed over, and it’s genuinely interesting.
The MacBook Neo doesn’t just use any A18 Pro. It uses a specifically defective version of it. This is called chip binning, and it’s a pretty common practice in the semiconductor industry.
When TSMC manufactures chips, not every chip that comes off the line is perfect. Sometimes one GPU core is faulty. Apple can’t put those chips in an iPhone 16 Pro, which needs all 6 GPU cores working. So what do you do with them? Normally you’d discard them. Instead, Apple stockpiled these chips — the ones with 5 working GPU cores out of 6 — and used them for the MacBook Neo. So the MacBook Neo chip is basically an A18 Pro reject that still works perfectly fine for laptop use.
This is also why the MacBook Neo costs $599. Apple wasn’t paying to manufacture new chips for this laptop. They used chips they already had sitting in a warehouse, chips that would otherwise be thrown away. The unit economics were basically unbeatable. And the chip, despite being “defective,” still lands between the M3 and M4 in single-core performance benchmarks. That’s actually kind of wild.
The problem Apple ran into — and this part is still developing as of early May 2026 — is that the Neo sold so well that they’re running out of those binned chips. They initially planned to make 5–6 million units. Demand was so high that Apple is now looking at 10 million units. TSMC’s N3E production lines are basically running at full capacity for other Apple products. Restarting A18 Pro production now would cost Apple a lot more money, which shrinks margins on a $599 laptop. Nobody quite knows what Apple is going to do about this. The current reporting suggests a MacBook Neo 2 with A19 Pro chips might arrive in late 2026 or January 2027 rather than waiting for the original timeline.
The Thermal Problem Nobody Talks About
So if the A chip and M chip are so similar, why not just put an M4 in an iPhone?
Short answer: the iPhone would probably overheat within minutes.
The M chip is designed to run in an environment where it can get hot and stay hot. MacBooks have fans. Even the fanless MacBook Air has a big aluminum chassis that acts as a heat spreader. The Mac mini has active cooling. The M4 is configured to sustain performance for extended periods — hour-long video exports, multi-hour rendering sessions. It runs at higher wattage because it can dump that heat somewhere.
An iPhone is a tiny aluminum sandwich. There’s essentially no room for cooling hardware. You can feel how hot an iPhone 16 Pro gets when you try to record 4K video for 20 minutes straight, or run a demanding game for a while. And that’s with the A18 Pro, which is specifically designed to be thermally conservative. The A chip is engineered around a tiny battery and almost no thermal headroom.
Stick an M4 in there and the chip would thermal-throttle almost immediately. The chip throttles when it gets too hot — it slows itself down to produce less heat. So you’d have an M4 that runs at M1 speeds because it can’t breathe. Plus your battery would drain in maybe 2–3 hours under any real load. The hardware just isn’t there to support it.
This is actually a reason to be impressed by what Apple is doing with the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo. In a fanless aluminum chassis, under sustained load, the A18 Pro bursts to full speed for about 60 seconds before thermal throttling kicks in and drops CPU utilization significantly. That’s the real-world limitation — not because the chip is weak, but because there’s no fan. You’re buying the silence and the $599 price tag, and the tradeoff is that it can’t sustain heavy loads for as long as an M4 MacBook Air can.
For most people — and honestly, this is most people — that limitation never actually shows up. Video editors who need to crunch through hours of ProRes footage every day should get the MacBook Air M5. For everyone else, the Neo is probably fine.
What the M Chip Is Actually Designed For
The M chip family — M4, M4 Pro, M4 Max — exists on a spectrum. The base M4 has 10 CPU cores and a 10-core GPU. The M4 Pro bumps that up significantly. The M4 Max goes to 40 GPU cores and 546 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a completely different category of machine aimed at people running 3D rendering or color grading 8K footage.
The thing the M chip does really well is sustain performance over time. An M4 MacBook Pro can encode video for 3 hours without slowing down. The thermal architecture — fans, heat pipes, the whole system — is built around keeping the chip in its performance range for as long as needed. And the unified memory architecture means the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine all share the same memory pool without copying data back and forth, which is a big deal for memory-intensive work.
The Neural Engine in both chips is the same — 16 cores, 35 TOPS. Apple Intelligence features run the same on an A18 Pro and an M4. That’s actually surprising and not something most people realize. The AI stuff isn’t where the chips diverge.
Where they really diverge is multi-core performance and sustained load. A Geekbench 6 multi-core score for the M4 is around 15,000. The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo scores around 8,879. That’s a big gap for things that actually use multiple cores — compiling code, complex Lightroom edits, running virtual machines.
The A Chip Wins on Battery
One place the A chip clearly wins is power efficiency in a mobile context.
The MacBook Neo gets around 16 hours of battery life in Apple’s testing. That’s better than most Windows laptops in this price range, partly because the A18 Pro is designed from the ground up to sip power. The efficiency cores in the chip handle light tasks at very low power draw. Browsing the web, writing, watching video — all of this runs mostly on those efficiency cores.
The iPhone 16 Pro gets impressive battery life for a phone despite running a very powerful chip, and that’s the same engineering philosophy. The A chip is tuned to give you great performance in short bursts while spending most of its time in a very low-power state.
The M chip is also efficient, but it’s optimized for a different tradeoff — more sustained performance, higher memory bandwidth, longer peak load sessions. When you’re not running heavy workloads, an M4 MacBook Air also gets excellent battery life. But the A18 Pro is more conservative at idle and light load, which is why it works well in a fanless $599 laptop.
What Happens If Apple Does This Again
The MacBook Neo is probably a preview of something. Not that Apple is going to replace all M chips with A chips — that’s not happening. The MacBook Air M5 is still the right laptop for most people who want a MacBook.
But there’s a logic to using A chips in entry-level Macs that clearly works. Apple gets to recycle binned chips from iPhone production, eliminate manufacturing cost, and sell a product at a price point they’ve never hit before. The A19 Pro — coming in the iPhone 17 Pro later in 2026 — will be the chip in the MacBook Neo 2, probably, using the same binning approach.
What Apple will probably never do is put an M chip in an iPhone. The thermal constraints alone make it a non-starter. An M4 in a phone chassis would throttle within a minute and kill the battery in a few hours. The A chip exists precisely because Apple needed something that does 80% of what the M chip does but fits inside a 170-gram device with a battery the size of a credit card stack.
The more interesting question is what happens when the A chip gets powerful enough that the gap between A and M genuinely closes. The A18 Pro is already within striking distance of M3 in single-core performance. The A19, A20 — at some point you have to wonder if the distinction between mobile and desktop chip even makes sense anymore, at least for the lower end of each category.
So Which Chip Do You Actually Care About
If you have an iPhone 16 Pro, you have the A18 Pro. If you’re thinking about the MacBook Neo at $599, you’re also getting the A18 Pro — specifically a 5-core GPU version that was a manufacturing reject. That’s not an insult. It’s still a fast chip that runs macOS Tahoe well, handles 4K video editing according to reviews like Tyler Stalman’s tests from March 2026, and does it all silently.
If you need sustained performance — long video exports, code compilation, professional workflows — you want an M chip. The M4 MacBook Air starts at a significantly higher price but gives you double the memory bandwidth, more CPU cores, and a chip that can sustain those workloads much longer without throttling.
The A chip is not the M chip’s inferior sibling. It’s a different product for a different context. Apple just figured out, correctly, that the MacBook Neo customer doesn’t actually need the M chip — and that $599 is a much more convincing number than $1099.
The internet freaked out. Apple is probably fine.