Forget OLED, what people want is cheaper MacBooks - and that might happen by using iPhone CPUs

Ever wished for a truly affordable MacBook? These Apple laptops could get a lot cheaper in the near future, if rumored plans to use an iPhone CPU in the notebooks to lower the cost are correct.

This comes from a respected Apple leaker, Ming-Chi Kuo, who claims that the reference design for the purported MacBook 13-inch is being provided by Everwin Precision (based in Shenzhen, China - a firm that's also involved in producing future smart glasses for Apple, as we reported elsewhere).

Kuo's post on X (spotted by Tom's Hardware) claims that the MacBook 13-inch will use an A18 Pro processor, and could enter mass production as soon as the final quarter of 2025, or possibly in Q1 2026.

That's pretty close at hand, with this rumor springing out of nowhere, and even providing potential colors for the cheap MacBook (silver, blue, pink, yellow will be some of the choices, we're informed).

Kuo believes this is part of a fresh strategy to bolster MacBook sales in 2026 and return to a peak shipment figure of 25 million as seen during the pandemic. That'd be a 25% increase on 2025, during which an estimated 20 million units were shipped.

The new affordable MacBook would theoretically account for some 5-7 million extra units, so the expectation is that the device would effectively drive that gain.

The key question is: how cheap would such a MacBook be? Currently the MacBook Air 13-inch starts from $999, which while relatively affordable for an Apple laptop, is hardly cheap.

We'd expect to see Apple dropping the price considerably from there, seeing as you can pick up MacBooks with older silicon for a fair bit less when it comes to major sales events like Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday.

Of course, the price tag would obviously depend on what other corners were cut other than using an iPhone chip for a CPU. Sadly Kuo doesn't touch on pricing except to say that the MacBook 13-inch with A18 Pro would be "more affordable" - we don't get any clues beyond that.