An Affordable MacBook Featuring an iPhone Chip Could Offer Unprecedented Battery Life

There’s an Apple rumor going around that I can’t stop musing about. (No, it’s not about a foldable iPhone.) It’s for a low-cost 13-inch MacBook that could cost hundreds of dollars less than Apple’s current $999 13-inch M4 MacBook Air.

Noted tech analyst and supply chain sleuth Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities said on Sunday that Apple is working on a 13-inch laptop powered by an A18 Pro chip. The tech blogosphere immediately erupted with skepticism that Apple would use a chip that powers the current iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max in a MacBook. It would be an insult to consumers who expect a desktop-class chip inside of laptop, not an equally powerful processor made for phones! 

Except, it wouldn’t be stupid. While I would love Apple to revive its discontinued, two-pound 12-inch MacBook with an M-series chip (even with a five-year-old M1 chip), selling a low-cost MacBook with an iPhone processor makes a whole lot of sense. Former Macworld Editor-in-Chief and independent Apple pundit Jason Snell put it into perspective best with his handy charts on his blog Six Colors:

As Snell notes, Apple’s A18 Pro chip is “46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks.” For general laptop tasks like browsing the web, watching videos, and messaging, the iPhone chip would be more than sufficient.

Besides potentially costing less than the $999 M4 MacBook Air—many believe this new low-cost MacBook could replace the $650 Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air—there could be some major upsides to using a phone chip inside of a laptop. Allow me to get nerdy for just a second: The A18 Pro chip is built with a 3-nanometer (nm) process compared to the M1’s 5nm. The newer node process means there are more transistors on the chip. More transistors mean more performance; the newer and smaller process means lower power efficiency. Put them together, and you get a killer combo for good-enough performance with potentially even longer battery life.

For most people who don’t need a beefy GPU for heavy workloads like gaming, 3D modeling, or AI, laptop performance has been offering diminishing returns for years now. What people want most is longer battery life so that they don’t need to plug in as frequently. Imagine for a minute if Apple decided to tout class-leading battery life with even longer hours than its own M4 MacBook Air. What if such a MacBook had a full day of battery life or days of battery life from a single charge? And if Apple can package that in a clamshell design that’s even thinner and lighter and costs less? And then sell them in more fun colors like “silver, blue, pink, and yellow,” as Kuo says Apple is considering? Oh man, you’ve got a recipe for a laptop that would crush sales.

And crush sales, Apple reportedly needs to do. Kuo says that this low-cost MacBook could help Apple return to its peak of shipping around 25 million MacBooks annually.

Snell does note one downside to using the A18 Pro chip if Apple decides to go that route: the laptop would likely only support USB-C data speeds and not faster Thunderbolt. That’s just the limitation of the A18 Pro chip spec versus an M-series chip. The tradeoff for incredible battery life and an affordable price would be worth it, though.