The MacBook Neo has shocked the budget laptop space, and is actually so popular that Apple can’t keep up with the demand! But even though we’re waiting weeks to get one, the company continues to have one eye on the future, as Tim Culpan just claimed that the new MacBook Neo will be equipped with the A19 Pro chip and 12GB of RAM.
In his Culpium newsletter, he talks about the dilemma being faced by Apple right now between either having suppliers focus on building the next Neo or fueling the runaway success of this year’s model. Let’s get into the details, and the one game-changing upgrade I really want to see come to the next cheap MacBook.
What’s been rumored
As you may already know about tech companies, product plans and timelines span years ahead of what we have in our hands today. So every now and again, we’ll get a sneak peek into where things could be going through the rumor mill. And in his newsletter, Culpan has claimed that the 2027 MacBook Neo will come armed with two important upgrades:
- The A19 Pro chip (found in iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max)
- 12GB of RAM
These would bring nice gains to both single-core speeds, but most importantly, workloads that need multithreaded speeds and many apps will get a bump too.
System |
Geekbench single-core |
Geekbench multicore |
|---|---|---|
A19 Pro (iPhone 17 Pro Max) |
3871 |
9968 |
A18 Pro (MacBook Neo) |
3535 |
8920 |
So if you’re on a Neo and you’ve felt that ceiling of what it can do, that could be raised by quite an amount with these speed boosts.
What I want to see
Of course, an upgrade in silicon performance and a bump in unified memory is a good thing. But the real step to effective performance gains (something you’ve been seeing a lot of YouTubers doing) is improving thermal management.
You see at the moment, the Neo uses passive cooling with a thin graphene strip placed on the internals. Nothing wrong with that for general day-to-day usage but once you have multiple apps open or you try to do something a little heavy duty on it, the whole system throttles so as to not overheat.
And as several people took their Neos apart and replaced that graphene sheet with an actual thermal pad, performance went up and stayed sustained for much longer. Yes, some of these experiments were a little wild (shout-out to jakkuh for adding some insane watercooling to it).
But the thermal pad is something Apple could do very cheaply and give us all immediate gains paired with that A19 Pro and 12GB memory. This is an easy slam dunk for the Cupertino crew, and I hope they see it through!
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