Hey Apple, keep the iPhone out of my Mac!

Macworld

The tech rumor mill almost lost its wind vanes last week when product identifiers for no fewer than 15 new Macs leaked all at once. Apple journalists, normally starved for information during the post-WWDC summer months, were suddenly able to gorge on the entire M5 roadmap, with four M6-based MacBook Pro models thrown in for good measure… plus a little surprise that doesn’t involve an M-class processor at all.

Labeled J700, the wild-card entry in Apple’s upcoming Mac portfolio doesn’t appear to belong to any existing Mac family. (There are familiar patterns to Mac identifiers: MacBook Pros normally end with a 14 or 16, MacBook Airs with 13 or 15, and so on. This looks like something new.) The most likely explanation is that it’s a cheap MacBook based around the A18 Pro iPhone processor, a device that has been floated for years but recently popped up in the Serious Rumor Mill. Yes, you heard that right: Apple engineers are expected to use the chip from an iPhone in a laptop.

Regardless of the processor, the “cheap” part of that description probably sounds appealing. But I’d advise caution before rushing to throw your Chromebooks in the garbage. I’m skeptical about this concept for several reasons.

First, about that price. Yes, dropping to an A-class processor is likely to allow Apple to get the price of its entry-level laptop below the current $999 MacBook Air. But don’t expect a bargain; Cupertino simply doesn’t do them. Whenever word gets out that Apple is working on a budget version of one of its product lines, pundits make bold predictions of low prices, but these are consistently confounded when the device arrives.

The iPhone 5c wasn’t as cheap as hoped (sold subsidized for $99 (16GB) in the U.S., but starting at £469 in the U.K.), and the iPhone 16e ($599) isn’t cheap at all. The Apple Watch SE ($279) wasn’t as cheap as hoped and the 3-year-old second-gen model is still a bit too pricey at $249. Even the Mac mini, which launched at $499 back in 2005 with no monitor or keyboard, has never been what you’d regard as a bargain. Other companies sell smartwatches for under $100 and smartphones under $200: that’s cheap. But when we talk about budget Apple devices, what we really mean is that the company is going to make a rare foray into the lowish mid-market.

So I’m almost certain that the A18-based MacBook won’t be as cheap as we want it to be. I also don’t think it will perform the way we want it to, because A-class chips, while sharing the same general architecture as M chips and therefore adapting well to the same hardware, are simply a lot slower. As my colleague Roman points out, the A18 Pro is not just slower than last year’s M4, but it’s also slower than the M3, M2, and even (by a small margin) the M1 from 2020 when measuring multi-core performance, the kind of thing that matters on a Mac but not so much on an iPhone.

If processing power isn’t a big deal for you, perhaps this is a compromise you’re prepared to make. Personally, I feel that a laptop’s processor is one of its most important features, but I’ll concede that for reading emails and browsing the web, an M1 or an A18 would be absolutely fine. Still, if that’s what you’re looking for, I might point out that MacBooks with outdated processors are already available in the Apple refurbished store. And you can get an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $650, which is likely less than an A18 Pro MacBook would cost.

In any case, it’s unlikely that Apple will limit itself to just the one compromise. The company loves an upsell, and the one common feature to all of its “budget” products has been the seemingly deliberate omission of something that users like. I suspect that the standard iPad has an unlaminated display, more than a decade after Apple started laminating its tablets, to both keep costs low and push customers into paying extra for an iPad Air. And I’m certain that the switch to a two-tier iPhone processor strategy was wholly implemented to upsell Pro models, just as the 16e’s infuriating compromises are intended to push you towards the iPhone 16. Too many people were choosing the cheaper iPhones, so Apple made them worse.

It’ll do the same for a cheap MacBook. Maybe the webcam will be horrible; maybe the display will have a lower resolution; maybe you’ll miss out on Touch ID or only get one USB-C port, which also has to serve for charging, as was the case with the 12-inch MacBook. Maybe the laptop will have a garish plastic casing to save money on aluminum.

The fact is, Apple isn’t very good at cheap products, probably by design. Its business model is based around high margins, not high volume: it’s perfectly willing to miss out on a major market if it doesn’t see the value. So a MacBook with an iPhone processor, if Apple decided to make one, wouldn’t be especially cheap, yet would feature some kind of annoying compromise in order to upsell you to something more expensive. I’ll give it a pass, thanks.




Foundry

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Trending: Top stories

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Ad nauseam: Apple might actually be doomed if this keeps up.

Alex Blake rounds up 8 hidden watchOS 26 features that are better than Liquid Glass.

These six iOS 26 hints all but confirm the iPhone 17 Air.

Podcast of the week

Apple has hit its stride with its MacBook lineup, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels. On episode 941 of the Macworld Podcast, we talk about the latest MacBook rumors.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

The rumor mill

Apple may give Siri a brain transplant with the help of Claude or ChatGPT.

Some upcoming iPhone features were kept secret at WWDC, report claims.

Apple India job posts suggest AI search is coming to Siri, Safari, and Spotlight.

Betas, more betas, and everything else coming from Apple in July.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

iPhone owners! Watch out for this surprisingly plausible phishing scam.

High-tech Mac malware hides itself in fake Zoom update.

Apple praised for ‘noticeable’ fixes to iOS 26’s performance and stability.

iOS 18.6 beta 2 is here, but the changes are only for EU users.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.