Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Apple’s current entry-level laptop is the $999 MacBook Air, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple is aiming to launch an even more affordable model soon.

He writes on X that Apple will go into production in late 2025 or early 2026 on a new MacBook model that will be powered by the A18 Pro chip, rather than an M-series processor. This is the same chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro line. The machine may feature colorful casing options, including silver, pink, and yellow.

Kuo says the cheaper MacBook would feature the same 13-inch screen size as the current MacBook Air, suggesting that the chip might be the only spec where consumers would notice a difference.

Unfortunately, it isn’t yet clear how much more affordable this model will actually be. Kuo says Apple is targeting production in the 5-7 million unit range for 2026, which would represent a significant portion of overall Mac laptop shipments. This suggests a pretty dramatic price point to attract such high volume of sales.

I genuinely don’t know how Apple aims to sell this machine. When I first read the headline Monday morning, I thought, “Ah, that’ll be a winner because people like cheap laptops.” But after looking through Apple’s product lineup, I don’t see how this model would be significantly cheaper than the current base-model M2 MacBook Air. Its closest competitor would be the 13-inch iPad Air without the Magic Keyboard, but that costs $900 with 256 gigabytes of storage — the minimum Apple puts in Macs these days. But that product has an M3 in it, so bumping it down to an A18 Pro would probably reduce the price by about $150 or so. Does anyone realistically see Apple selling a Mac laptop for anything less than $750? How would that even work?

This product would really only be viable if it were $500-ish, because that’s the only market Apple doesn’t have covered. People buying $800 laptops are also buying $1,000 ones, but $500 laptop buyers are a different class of consumer. That’s a different market that Apple has only covered by the base-model iPad, which is hardly a computer. I find it hard to believe Apple can fit a quality 13-inch screen, good keyboard, trackpad, speakers, and webcam into a case for $500 to $600 — i.e., $100 to $200 more than the base-model iPad, which has a smaller, low-quality screen, and no trackpad or keyboard. The economics just don’t work for Apple.

I’d gladly eat words if Apple sells this product and it does well, but that just seems unlikely. You can get a refurbished M2 MacBook Air for $700, which is realistically what Apple would sell this new “MacBook” at, and I don’t see how an A18 Pro would be better than that machine. Maybe this works if Apple removes the base-model MacBook Air from sale at $1,000 and pushes people to choose between the cheaper one or the newer, more-expensive MacBooks Air with M3 processors? It would also work if Apple is prioritizing new Mac acquisitions rather than making a profit, but that’s rare. (See: the new iPhone 16e, which is more expensive than any other budget iPhone.)

What’s more likely than all of this is that Kuo is just wrong. He was once an incredibly reliable leaker, but he leaks at the supply chain level, where it’s trickier to divulge information.. I’m inclined to believe him this time since MacRumors dug into Apple’s software and found references to the new laptop, but I still find this a remote possibility. Maybe if Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s Apple reporter, says something, I’ll begin to buy it.