Bloomberg adds heat to the low-cost MacBook rumors
After a 2023 report from Digitimes and a July 2025 report from Ming-Chi Kuo, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is joining in on reports that Apple is planning to release of a low-cost laptop:
Apple plans to sell the new machine for well under $1,000 by using less-advanced components. The laptop will rely on an iPhone processor and a lower-end LCD display. The screen will also be the smallest of any current Mac, coming in at slightly below the 13.6-inch one used in the MacBook Air.
Gurman says Apple expects to release the laptop in the first half of next year.
As I wrote when dissecting Kuo’s report back in July, the rumored “iPhone processor” driving this Mac might be an A18 Pro, which would offer comparable performance to the M1 processor still being sold in the MacBook Air at Walmart:
The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today, its performance characteristics make it perfectly suitable as a low-cost Mac laptop, building a new model on the A18 Pro would not be a bad move. It wouldn’t have Thunderbolt, only USB-C, but that’s not a dealbreaker on a cheap laptop. It might reuse parts from the M1 Air, including the display.
Gurman’s mention of a lower-end LCD display sounds an awful lot like the M1 Air’s 13.3-inch display. I continue to wonder if this low-cost laptop is going to be more or less the M1 Air with a slightly more modern processor.