The Most-Hated MacBook Could Return Without the Same Compromises

There’s a good reason we haven’t seen anything resembling the defunct 12-inch MacBook in more than a decade. But many things have changed since 2015, and where that ultra-thin and light laptop had shortcomings all over the place, Apple may be preparing a new small-sized MacBook with performance that could beat a MacBook Air with M1 chip.

Multiple reports this year have hinted at Apple crafting a new, “cheap†MacBook that could cost less than the latest $1,000 MacBook Air with M4. Recent reports said the smaller Mac would use an A18 Pro chip found in last year’s iPhone 16 Pro. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the smartphone chip powering the laptop currently in testing was able to beat the performance of Apple’s own 5-year-old M1 chip. For what it’s worth, any Apple silicon from the past five years is going to run circles around the super-slow Intel Core M-series chips, and even the later dual-core Core i5 and i7 chipsets.

Gurman also claims the new MacBook will have an LCD display that’s slightly smaller than the recent 13.6-inch MacBook Air models. This may result in a 12.9-inch device or even smaller. This means Apple will need to craft an entirely new shell for this new laptop, like it had for the 12-inch MacBook.

What we don’t know is whether the new MacBook will have MagSafe charging and two USB-C—like the MacBook Air—instead of a single port for everything. It’ll be interesting to see whether the MacBook will also have a minimum of 12GB of RAM like the iPhone 17 Pro. Apple previously claimed 8GB of RAM was the minimum needed to run Apple Intelligence, but with each passing year, it’s becoming more evident that more RAM is necessary, especially for running AI models on-device.

Though Apple still loves to push device compactness with thin and light designs (hello, iPhone Air), it’s unlikely this low-cost MacBook would be so thin that it’d need a redesigned keyboard that sacrifices typing comfort for slimness. We’re pretty sure Apple learned its lesson from the awful “butterfly†keyboards first introduced on the 12-inch MacBook.

Either way, if this new MacBook costs anywhere south of $800, it could be the most popular MacBook of Apple’s entire slate coming next year. Apple reportedly has plans to reveal new MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. It could also offer customers the OLED MacBook Pro we’ve been demanding for so, so long.

Apple could crush Chromebooks without even trying

A smartphone chip beating a full laptop-ready processor is already worthy of note. We normally don’t run any apples-to-oranges comparisons between laptops and smartphones. At the same time, the latest A19 Pro and competing Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 chips are growing so powerful that some phonemakers are creating novel ways to keep them from overheating.

The kinds of Intel chips you can get for low-end Windows devices or Chromebooks are enough for everyday browsing tasks, but they’ll struggle with anything more technical. The best example of Chromebook processors I’ve personally used was a MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910. That chip is used in high-end Chromebooks like the $700 Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 and the $700 Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514. Last month, MediaTek revealed a scaled-down version of that chip, the Kompanio 540, built for slightly cheaper Chromebooks.

Any MacBook with the full macOS 26 suite would crush Google’s ChromeOS. Google’s limited operating system is dependent on the Chrome browser and streaming for most applications. Company execs have said they were working on combining ChromeOS with Android to allow users to access all those mobile apps natively. How well they’ll work on a laptop-sized screen is another issue entirely. A cheapo MacBook will have a huge lead in software alone. So long as it doesn’t have anything resembling a butterfly keyboard—controls so bad they would break if you looked at them wrong—then there’s a good reason to be excited.