Rumor Tips A19 Pro SoC and 12 GB RAM for Apple MacBook Neo

The Apple MacBook Neo has been a bit of a shock to system in the laptop world, thanks to its low barrier to entry and surprisingly solid performance for everyday tasks. However, one of the biggest criticisms levelled against the MacBook Neo is its mobile A18 Pro chip and limited 8 GB of RAM. According to recent rumors, though, Apple may upgrade the internals in the MacBook Neo in 2027, bumping it up to an A19 Pro, which is the SoC featured in the latest iPhone 17 Pro smartphones.

The A19 Pro is still a mobile SoC, and it is slated to use the same 5-core GPU configuration as the A18 Pro in the current MacBook Neo, but that SoC upgrade also means that the MacBook Neo would no longer be limited to just 8 GB of LPDDR5X. Instead, as the rumors suggest, the MacBook Neo 2027 will see a 50% memory increase to 12 GB total memory. So far, the MacBook Neo seems to have been such a hit in sales that the Cupertino giant has already started increasing production of the laptop.

No exact release date has even been speculated for the upgraded Neo, but it has been pointed out by industry analyst Tim Culpan and Ben Thompson at Stratechery that the MacBook Neo seems to be using defective SoCs that were manufactured for the iPhone 16 Pro series and that there may be a somewhat limited supply of those chips. The Neo’s design being based on rejected silicon may be why we could see the MacBook Neo get new internals a little over a year after the initial release of the device. It would also explain why the A19 Pro version of the Neo will stick with a 5-core GPU, where the iPhone models using the same SoC have 6-core GPUs.