You can’t expect too much from a laptop that costs less than $1,000 or even $800. Naturally, something has to give, whether it’s performance, a pretty screen, or something else you may care about. For the long-rumored colorful and low-cost MacBook, we’ll likely see Apple make multiple compromises for the sake of price. If you’re thinking that sounds like a Chromebook, you’re on the right track.
As one of the many gadgets we expect to launch this year, Apple is reportedly planning to launch a cheap-ish MacBook as soon as next week. Invites sent to tech media, including Gizmodo, suggest we’ll know more on March 4. Multiple reports from Bloomberg’s regular Apple leaker, Mark Gurman, suggest the new cheapo Mac could come in multiple colorful tones and run on an A18 Pro chip—first released inside the iPhone 16 Pro.
If the smaller, supposedly 12.9-inch MacBook wants to hit a price point below $800, it will need to scale back on some features that Mac fans may be used to. MacRumors first picked up on a string of leaks stemming from the Chinese social media site Weibo (read with machine translation). As for the veracity of these rumors, you should take them with a heavy grain of salt. Either way, we should expect the next MacBook to be severely limited on both RAM and storage.
The leaks claim the next low-end MacBook will sport storage options between 256GB and 512GB. The size of macOS 26 varies depending on the Mac, though it can demand between 25GB to 30GB of storage before you start loading any apps or files onto your computer. At those specs, users will find their drive filling up rapidly. As a kicker, the low-cost MacBook could be limited to 8GB of RAM. Apple recently started selling new MacBooks like the recent M4 MacBook Air and M5 MacBook Pro with a base of 16GB of RAM. The ongoing memory shortage likely has Apple looking for ways to position smaller RAM specs in its laptops. As much as we want to run all our favorite apps on the cheap MacBook, the reduced RAM and storage may limit its capabilities even more than the mobile chipset.
Apple’s chance to push iCloud storage?
Chromebooks are similarly limited on storage and RAM. That’s because few expect to use these devices for anything but internet browsing, streaming, and storing files in the cloud. The most high-end Chromebooks from last year, like the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 and Acer Chromebook Spin 514, had powerful chips and more RAM, and most of that proved unnecessary for what was possible on ChromeOS. Google is pushing to combine ChromeOS with Android, which could make the operating system more useful for running native applications, but that’s still a ways off.
A cheaper MacBook may find itself limited like Chromebooks in other ways. The leaks suggest it won’t have access to fast charging. It may nix the coveted True Tone display, which changes the screen brightness based on ambient light. Apple may eschew the latest N1 connectivity chip found inside the latest iPhones and MacBooks for another Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip made by MediaTek. It may not even have a backlit keyboard.
To remediate the storage limitations, Apple could use this opportunity to push its iCloud-based subscriptions even harder than normal. Google’s ChromeOS is designed for Google One subscriptions, both for storage and for access to a motley assortment of AI apps. We’ll have to see for ourselves if the many Creator Studio apps run adequately on an A18 Pro chip compared to the much, much more powerful M5 chip. As Tim Cook just teased out this morning, we’ll find out more next week.
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