In the iPhone 16 Pro models, the A18 Pro chip has a 6-core GPU. During the chip manufacturing process, however, sometimes a CPU or GPU core can turn out to be faulty. Rather than discarding the leftover A18 Pro chips with only a 5-core GPU, Apple opted to use them in the MacBook Neo, as a way of optimizing its supply chain and costs.
These so-called “binned” chips with a 5-core GPU are effectively “free” to Apple, given that they otherwise would have been discarded.
Herein lies the dilemma.
In the latest edition of his Culpium newsletter today, Culpan said the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple’s supply of the binned A18 Pro chips with a 5-core GPU will “run out” before the company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop.
I’m sure some choice individuals could get that other core to work if it came to that.
Yeah, it seems petty to punish people for not being among the first to buy the Neo. That extra GPU core would not be a selling point. The fact that the MacBook Neo, with its binned A18 Pro, can play Cyberpunk, but my iPhone 16 Pro Max, with a regular A18 Pro, cannot, is already an advantage over my phone which cost over twice as much.
It’s worth noting at this point that phones not having AAA games is down to developers. Any game on the Switch 1 can run on your iPhone if your iPhone gets major updates. Any game on the Switch 2 can run on newer iPhones. Because those games were coded for ARM64. The only reason we don’t have Skyrim on the iPhone is because Bethesda hasn’t put it in the App Store. They already did the work. But they decided people wouldn’t pay $60 for a phone game. So they transitioned it into a free-to-play piece of shit called The Elder Scrolls: Blades and nobody liked it. They can let Skyrim go on sale for $10-20 on Steam and the Switch store, but they can’t swallow their pride and drop it on the App Store for $20? The game is 15 years old. But they’ve already done the work. This idea that you need an Xbox, a PlayStation, or a “gaming PC” to play AAA games is a farce. Even if you have a recent Android phone, you have the necessary performance. Phones running both platforms have had desktop performance for years now.
While it might be petty, disabling cores isn’t punishing the second wave of buyers. It’s making the second wave match the first it terms of specs.
Meanwhile, Warframe is a free game that run just fine on most any current iPhone, but they won’t release it on Mac even though the iOS beta ran great on an M1 Mini.