Will the $699 MacBook Be Apple’s New Budget King or a String of Sacrifices?

Apple is expected to unveil several new products next week, but the most significant may also be its most affordable: a $699 MacBook.

Rumors of a new suffix-less MacBook have been making the rounds since last summer, and the more we’ve heard about the idea, the more sense it makes. Apple has long had entry-level iPad and iPhone models available, and last year’s iPhone 16e moved away from the iPhone SE outlier to officially bring three tiers to its smartphone lineup, matching the iPad family.

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Now it’s time for the MacBook to follow suit, and it looks like the naming could follow the iPad quite closely, with a new “MacBook” filling in the budget tier below the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. This would not only provide a cheaper point of entry for consumers, but also finally offer a viable alternative to Chromebooks for price-conscious educational and enterprise markets.

Of course, Apple will have to cut a few corners to sell a MacBook at $699 or less, and that’s been kind of a good news-bad news situation. We’ve heard from the start that Apple plans to power this MacBook with an iPhone chip — likely the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro lineup — but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman also assuaged fears of a plastic MacBook by reporting that Apple is sticking with aluminum, and has actually developed “a new manufacturing process that allows the shells to be forged more quickly.”

However, until recently, we’ve heard little else about what other compromises might be involved in the new MacBook. While we probably won’t have to wait long to find out, new code snippets from macOS test builds shared by leakers have revealed some interesting new details.

The information comes from a relatively unknown Weibo leaker who has yet to build an established reputation, but much of what they’ve shared at least sounds plausible. Here’s a summary of what they claim we can expect:

1. No N1 chip. This one seems like a given, since Apple has yet to add its new Wi-Fi and Bluetooth silicon to any Macs. The N1 chip debuted with the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air last fall, and also found its way into the M5 iPad Pro in October, but was conspicuously omitted from the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro released at the same time. It seems unlikely Apple would bring it to the lower-cost MacBook first.
2. No Support for High-Impedance Headphones. We doubt anybody in the market for a $699 MacBook will miss this feature, which was initially exclusive to the most expensive MacBook Pro models. The base M2 MacBook Pro gained this in 2022 in one of the few changes over its M1 predecessor, as did the newly-redesigned M2 MacBook Air models, but it wasn’t present on any M1 or Intel Macs, so leaving it out of an A-series powered model isn’t a huge surprise.
3. No True Tone. This is where things get a little stranger. True Tone displays have been a standard feature of every MacBook since the Intel MacBook Air added it in 2020. Leaving it out of the new MacBook sounds like an understandable cost-cutting measure, but it will definitely set it apart from the rest of the pack.
4. A Dimmer Display. Along similar lines, the report says that the maximum brightness of the new MacBook’s display may come in below the 500 nits of the MacBook Air, but the report is a bit less clear on this point.
5. SSD Configurations and Speeds. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that there won’t be higher-capacity 1 TB and 2 TB configurations of this MacBook; it’s expected to be available in 256 GB and 512 GB versions only. Apple will also likely use slower SSD modules to cut costs.
6. No Backlit Keyboard. This would put it on par with the Magic Keyboard for the M3 iPad Air and Magic Keyboard Folio for iPad, both of which also lack backlighting.
7. No Fast Charging Support. It’s unclear how much slower this will be, but the leaker notes that the test build excludes the necessary drivers to handle higher voltage charging.
   

All of this information comes from interpreting code found in a macOS test build, in many cases looking at the presence or omission of drivers and kernel extensions that are typically used to support these features.

For instance, the new MacBook apparently uses the CS42L83 DAC from the M1 MacBook Air, which didn’t support high-impedance headphones, leading to the conclusion that the MacBook will be in the same boat. The test build also lacks the “AppleALSColorSensor” for a True Tone display and the “AppleHighVoltageCharger” driver for high-speed charging. The “AppleSunrise” Wi-Fi driver points to the MediaTek chip that’s also used in the base iPad model.

It will be interesting to see what trade-offs Apple actually makes here, but some things are a given. The MacBook will likely come with only 8 GB of RAM — the minimum for Apple Intelligence — which would be a bit surprising in an era where Apple has now set the floor at 16 GB for every other Mac. Still, the A18 Pro chip that’s expected to be inside uses a unified memory architecture, and unless Apple has redesigned that chip from the iPhone 16 Pro, it comes with only 8 GB.

The screen is expected to come in at 12.9 inches, making it slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, and we’ll likely only get standard USB-C ports rather than the Thunderbolt ports found on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

The leaker in question has made a few other unrelated predictions, including an A20 Pro chip for the next iPad mini and a 90 Hz refresh rate for the upcoming Apple Studio Display, but it’s unclear how much these are based on educated speculation versus actual supply chain rumor sources. In this case, however, we’ll know more about the veracity of this report soon enough, as Apple is widely expected to unveil its budget MacBook by this time next week.