(Image credit: Apple)

Apple’s MacBook Neo launched back in March to rave reviews. It’s the cheapest laptop the company has ever offered, with a starting price of £599 (or £499 if you can take advantage of the education pricing), and it’s superb for the money.

Rather than running on the M-series of processors like the rest of the MacBooks launched in the last five years, the MacBook Neo is powered by leftover A18 Pro chips that previously made for the iPhone 16 Pro.

However, it’s said the leftover processors were kept in storage after they were produced with partially defective cores, meaning they couldn’t be used in the iPhone 16 Pro that required a six-core CPU.

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They were fine for the MacBook Neo though – the only issue is, there was only a finite number of them.

Why is there talk of price increases for the MacBook Neo?

Rather than letting them go to waste, it's said the spare chips were repurposed into five-core CPUs and put into the latest MacBook, but now the stock is apparently running out. And that leaves Apple with an intriguing decision.

According to 9to5Mac, analyst Tim Culpan claims Apple has revised its plans after the runaway success of the new device. It now expects to make 10 million MacBook Neos in total – double what was initially ordered.

As a result, this will require a new run of A18 Pro processors to be manufactured, which would consequently be accompanied by a bill from Apple’s chipset manufacturer TSMC.

The cost of the previous run of A18 Pro processors had already been accounted for, being as they were discarded chips left in reserve. The report goes on to say that it's therefore unclear whether the price of the MacBook Neo will increase as a result of more processors having to be manufactured – especially during the global RAM crisis.

We think it's unlikely. It could be that Apple will instead have to accept lower profit margins on the Neo going forward – to keep the buzz about its new laptop continuing apace.

Culpan suggests Apple might actually stop selling the 256GB version of the MacBook Neo though, and only sell the 512GB model in the future, which costs £100 more and offers larger profit margins.

At the moment, it isn't clear, but there have already been rumours of a second-generation MacBook Neo so it might not be a problem for too long.