MacBook Neo Could Get New Colors to Cushion Potential Price Hike
I am very glad I ordered mine already. A snippet from the article:
“Shipping estimates on Apple's website currently sit at two to three weeks across the lineup in the U.S. and many other countries, with Quanta and Foxconn said to be racing to fill orders from factories in Vietnam and China.
However, meeting the doubled production target requires a fresh batch of A18 Pro chips from TSMC. The Neo uses the same system-on-chip as the iPhone 16 Pro, and Apple quickly exhausted its existing inventory filling early orders. The original run was made on TSMC's N3E process at least two years ago, and it is believed that TSMC has no spare 3nm capacity to allocate, as AI customers are sucking up much of the available output.
What's worse for Apple is that the first batch of A18 Pro chips were "binned" versions with minor defects that, rather than scrapping, were repurposed for the Neo by switching off one of the six GPU cores.
That means a new production run will result in top-tier chips rather than defective ones, which means a higher per-unit cost that Apple will have to pay even before TSMC adds a premium for expedited production.
DRAM prices have also climbed sharply since the Neo first went on sale -- again driven by AI data center build-out -- which has pushed the laptop's bill of materials higher still.”