A Low-Cost MacBook Could Resemble a Chromebook in More Ways Than One

You can’t expect too much from a laptop that costs under $1,000 or even $800. Naturally, something has to give, whether it’s performance, a beautiful screen, or anything else you care about. For the long-rumored colorful and low-cost MacBook, we’ll likely see Apple make a number of compromises on price. If you’re thinking this sounds like a Chromebook, you’re on the right track.

As one of the many gadgets we’re expecting to launch this year, Apple is reportedly planning to launch a cheaper MacBook next week. Invitations 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 that the new cheaper Mac could come in multiple color tones and run on the A18 Pro chip – first released inside the iPhone 16 Pro.

If the smaller, supposedly 12.9-inch MacBook wants to reach a price under $800, it will need to scale back some features that Mac fans may be used to. MacRumors first picked up a series of leaks from Chinese social media site Weibo (read with machine translation). As far as the veracity of these rumors is concerned, you should take them seriously. Either way, we should expect the next MacBook to be severely limited on both RAM and storage.

The leak claims that the next low-end MacBook will sport storage options between 256GB and 512GB. The size of macOS 26 varies depending on the Mac, although it may demand 25GB to 30GB of storage before it starts loading any apps or files on your computer. At those specifications, users will find their drives filling up faster. As a kicker, lower-priced MacBooks may be limited to 8GB of RAM. Apple recently started selling new MacBooks like the M4 MacBook Air and M5 MacBook Pro with a base of 16GB RAM. Apple has been looking for ways to have smaller RAM specs in its laptops due to the ongoing memory shortage. As much as we’d love to run all our favorite apps on a cheap MacBook, less RAM and storage can limit its capabilities even more than a mobile chipset.

A chance for Apple to expand iCloud storage further?

Chromebooks are equally limited on storage and RAM. This is because few people expect to use these devices for anything other than Internet browsing, streaming, and storing files in the cloud. Last year’s most high-end Chromebooks, like the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 and Acer Chromebook Spin 514, had powerful chips and more RAM, and most of them 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 apps, but that’s still a ways off.

A cheaper MacBook may find itself as limited as a Chromebook in other ways. The leak shows that it will not have the facility of fast charging. This could eliminate the coveted True Tone display, which changes screen brightness depending on ambient light. Apple may ditch the latest N1 connectivity chip found inside the latest iPhones and MacBooks for another Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip made by MediaTek. It may also not have a backlit keyboard.

To address storage limitations, Apple may use this opportunity to increase its iCloud-based subscriptions even more than usual. Google’s ChromeOS is designed for Google One subscriptions, for storage and access to a variety of AI apps. We’ll have to see for ourselves whether several Creator Studio apps run adequately on the A18 Pro chip compared to the more powerful M5 chip. As Tim Cook teased this morning, we’ll know more next week.