Apple, long revered for its premium-priced products, has managed to develop a booming business selling cheaper devices when most gadget makers are being hammered by rising costs.
One of its secrets: using chips with slight defects that might otherwise be thrown out.
The strategy is apparent in the technical minutiae of the newly released $599 MacBook Neo, which early data suggest is a hit with customers.
The chip powering the Neo is Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip first used inside the iPhone 16 Pro two years ago, but with one key difference. The Neo version of the chip has a “5-core” graphics processor, one less than the version inside the 2024 iPhones, indicating that Apple was able to save some of the A18 Pro chips with a defective core for future use.