The dark satanic rumour mill has churned out a hell-on-earth yarn claiming that the low-cost MacBook will run on an A18 Pro, the same chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro range. That would be bad enough, as chips for phones are not as good as chips for PCs, but now the rumours have changed after an internal kernel debug kit suggested the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple had been testing the machine with an A15 Bionic.
For those who came in late, the A15 is the chip that powered the iPhone 13 family, which was a lifetime ago in Apple years. If that rumour proves true, and if silicon ever made it into a retail MacBook, it would trail behind Apple’s budget iPad, which now ships with an A16.
A leaked iOS 26 build has spilt details on a grab bag of future hardware, including clues about this supposedly affordable Mac. Engineers’ debug tools showed a project tagged mac14p running on a platform labelled H14P, which points directly at the A15 Bionic.
According to MacRumors, that configuration lines up with a MacBook codenamed J267, suggesting it was at least real enough to test. There is evidence of another MacBook variant, tagged J700, paired with the A18 Pro and a Sunrise wireless subsystem from MediaTek.
Backend code suggests the A18 Pro version is the one heading for production, which makes far more sense for a new machine.
Releasing a brand-new MacBook powered by a near five-year-old phone chip would be peak Jobs’ Mob penny-pinching. The A18 Pro is faster, more efficient and far better placed to survive macOS updates without embarrassing pauses.
Anyone with even passing technical knowledge would howl if Apple tried flogging a new laptop running silicon from the iPhone 13 era. Display rumours have also been doing the rounds, with talk of a 12.9-inch panel floating about.
A safer bet is a reused 13-inch screen from the MacBook Air, which would save Apple a tidy sum by leaning on an ageing supply line. The low-cost MacBook is expected to land in the first quarter of 2026 and will likely come in cheerful colours for those who think that technological smugness is expressed in colour rather than ability.
