New “Budget” MacBook with A18 Pro Hardware Rumors

Remember the 2015 MacBook 12” with a single USB-C port? When it was released ~10 years ago, it was controversial for its single USB-C port and one headphone jack. It spearheaded the way for 5 years of “dongle-life” before Apple reversed course in 2020.

We had one until recently before giving it to a non-Mac friend. It survived several cross country trips and moving 4 times. At times, it sat inside a drawer for weeks and months. Do we miss it? Yes, we miss it. We don’t miss it for its lack of performance (with a crippled Intel M chip) but the form factor of having something small like an iPad with MacOS installed on it was nice.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and the usual Apple pundits are predicting a new “budget” MacBook 13” will be in our future. Now the Internet is going crazy with rumors of Apple’s latest ultra compact notebook.

The current rumor is it will be powered by the A18 Pro chip found in the iPhone 16 Pros. The A18 Pro and M4 are closely related with both sharing 3nm (N3E) manufacturing process, ARMv9.2-A instruction set, and 16-core Apple Neural Engines.

If the A18 Pro’s performance largely carries over, the combined system performance (16,381) will be comparable to a M1 (15,271) but the single core speed will stand out as the main value proposition as it’s fast a M4 (~25,689).

With the A18 Pro’s single core speed (3,400) is comparable to a M4 (3,786) but because it’s a “mobile” processors, there are only 6 multi-cores (2 high performance + 4 efficiency cores) versus the M4’s up to 10 cores. Thus multi-core app performance will not be anywhere need a M4 and closer to a M1 device (8,268).

The GPU will be more in line with the M1 unless Apple makes any modifications and as a “budget” model, it should work for most users who don’t need high performance graphics.

The rumor is it will be a sub $700-800 laptop. Other rumor-mongers have previously speculated this machine such as YouTubers from Max Tech was going to be released last year, which obviously had not come into fruition. But when/if it does, we predict it will be a hit because most apps are single core and it will feel fast as Macs with M4 base SoCs.

Kuo also predicts a variety of colors similar to the consumer iPad palette to make it attractive to a wide audience of users. When/If this model is released later this year, we have a strong feeling this will become Apple’s most popular laptop of all time beating the MacBook Air series in terms of volume sales.

Update – March 2026: Apple’s announced the new MacBook Neo – it’s finally here!