Apple is selling you defective chips, and you’re happily buying them
Apple is reportedly selling chips with minor defects in its products. This strategy allows the company to offer cheaper alternatives without compromising overall performance significantly. The new MacBook Neo exemplifies this approach by using a slightly downgraded version of its A18 Pro chip.
- ▪Apple has developed a business model around using processors with slight defects.
- ▪The new MacBook Neo features a 5-core graphics processor instead of the 6-core version found in the iPhone 16 Pro.
- ▪Consumers may not notice the difference in performance due to the minor defects in the chips.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/apple-is-selling-you-defective-chips-and-youre-happily-buying-them/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 08:04:17 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T08:09:57.400Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T08:09:57.400Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GIzfTlYcT0Ct |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple has a very clever trick up its sleeve when it comes to its silicon. The company is selling you chips that did not fully make the cut. But the really funny part is, you probably never noticed. A new report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that Apple has built a strong business around using processors with slight defects or lower-performing parts in cheaper products. The best example of this is the new $599 MacBook Neo, which uses Apple’s A18 Pro chip but with a 5-core graphics processor, rather than the version with one more GPU core used in the iPhone 16 Pro lineup.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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