A huge amount of leaks and rumours are doing the rounds at the moment, covering new cameras and new tech. But by far the most compelling one is the prospect of a $599 MacBook, which seems to be on the verge of actually becoming a reality.
We seem to be in the depths of silly season at the moment, with the rumour mill kicking into overdrive. Today alone has brought news that Hasselblad could be prepping the world’s first camera with built-in LiDAR, while DJI is looking to spoil the upcoming Antigravity launch with its own rapidly developed 360-degree drone. Elsewhere, Canon either is or should buy ARRI, everyone’s waiting for the Sony A7V, and DJI is releasing a robot vacuum cleaner (this one is true). But our favourite rumor — based entirely on how much we want it to come true — is that production on a low-cost MacBook is getting ready to start in the next month.
“Some components are expected to enter mass production by the end of the third quarter of 2025, a schedule that could see full system assembly begin before the end of the year,” writes DigiTimes.
The entry level MacBook Air has been pegged at $999 for long enough now that it feels set in stone, so taking $400 off that price is a huge reduction. How on earth is Cupertino hoping to pull that off?
Well, one easy way would be to sell it at cost as a loss leader and introduction to the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Apple’s gross margin on laptops is thought to be anywhere between 35-40%, which is way higher than an industry average that hovers closer to 20%. Add in taxes, energy costs and whatnot, and it still has a net profit margin of an estimated 24% across the company. Just deduct that and a $749 MacBook would sound appealing to many people.
However, the danger of that move would be in setting a precedent across the rest of its extensive product line, so it’s much more likely to shave component costs to make it happen. And that increasingly looks to be mainly by using an iPhone chip in place of its M-series ones.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo was the first to suggest Apple might pivot to using an iPhone chip, specifically the A18 Pro that sits inside the current iPhone 16 Pro, for a new line of entry-level MacBooks back in June. The chip is no slouch, offering performance comparable to an M4 chip during single-core operations, and only being outpaced when it comes to multicore or Metal operations according to Geekbench stats. In fact, even in multicore operations it matches the M1 closely, and the legions of M1 Mac users who aren’t hurrying to buy new machines at the moment are testament to how satisfactory that performance is (as well as being a whole other issue for Apple).
Few entry-level MacBook users will be looking to throw high-end processing tasks at the machine, so having something that can handle standard productivity software and browsing with panache would make perfect sense, though the company will probably ship with a minimum RAM spec and as small an SSD as it thinks it can get away with. The 128 GB of the iPhone 16 Pro would be harsh for laptop users, but 256 GB and 8 GB of RAM feels in the right ballpark. It’s also reasonable to expect some tweaks to the screen, which. for instance, might end up not being able to reach the same max brightness as the current models.
One of the common objections raised to why Apple would consider doing this is that it would cannabilize existing MacBook sales. There would definitely be fewer people looking to spend $999 on a MacBook if they can pick up a model trailing at the leading edge for up to $400 less.
But this is what Apple effectively does throughout its product range. Its iPads range from a base spec $349 to $999; its iPhones start at $599 for the 16e and head up to £1199 for the 16 Pro Max, and it’s desktops now start with a rejuvenated Mac mini for a frankly extremely tempting $599 (that’s with an M4 chip, 16 GB RAM, and a 256 GB SSD) and go up to north of $12,000 for a fully specced Mac Pro.
In short, the company identifies a niche and targets a machine at it. And you can’t help feeling that a $599 MacBook, even a $699 one if it wants to factor in the $100 educational discount that a good proportion of its market will be using to buy it, is a tempting proposition. So tempting, in fact, that DigiTimes reckons Apple could boost its current 17–18 million units shipped annually by an impressive 30–40%.
That’s a lot of new machines. Currently it looks like the new cutprice MacBook won’t make it to the market until 2026, so if you want a new Apple laptop for the holidays you’ll have to go the existing $999 route. You’d imagine that Apple will probably keep it under wraps until after then, too, so it doesn’t hurt existing sales too much in what is becoming a critical and tariff-affected year. In other words, don’t expect any announcements too soon.
Some of the other rumours we talked about at the start of this piece are going to come to fruition much sooner. But, to be honest, we could live without them if it meant that this one could come true and we could get our hands on a $599 MacBook next year. Though it has to be said the cats would love that DJI robot vacuum…