Yellow, Green, Pink MacBook? Apple's Most Colorful Laptop in Years Surfaces

Tuesday, 17 February 2026 at 08:42

Mark Gurman says Apple's cheap MacBook is real. Coming around March 2026. And no—it's not just a MacBook Air with things removed. This is a genuinely different product built around a different chip, different price, different audience. Got questions about its price? I guess it could land somewhere between $599 and $799. Current MacBook Air costs $1,099 to start. This new model sits nearly $300 below that, edging into Chromebook territory where Apple has never competed before.

Students buying laptops for school typically spend $400-$700. Apple never had anything for that range. This fills that gap directly.

Key Points:

Budget MacBook rumored at $599-$799 using A18 Pro chip instead of M-series silicon
12.9-inch IPS display with aluminum chassis despite lower price point confirmed by Gurman
Apple testing yellow, green, blue, and pink color options for first colorful MacBook in years
Revised manufacturing process reduces costs while maintaining unibody aluminum construction
Device targets students and first-time Mac buyers competing against entry-level Windows laptops

Wait—An iPhone Chip?

Yeah, really. Gurman says Apple skipped M-series silicon entirely here. The processor is reportedly an A18 Pro—literally the same chip that ran inside iPhone 16 Pro last year.

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Sounds weird until you think about it. A18 Pro handles YouTube, Google Docs, Zoom calls, coding, and light photo editing without any trouble. That covers maybe 95% of what students actually do on laptops daily. M-series chips are absolutely faster, but you're paying hundreds of dollars extra for performance most buyers never use.

The real unknown is macOS. Apple never shipped a Mac with A-series silicon before. How well everything runs—battery efficiency, background app handling, thermal management—nobody actually knows yet.

Aluminum Stays

This part matters more than people realize. Gurman reports Apple built a revised manufacturing process specifically to cut costs without switching to plastic. The unibody aluminum chassis apparently survives intact.

Walk into any school library and look at student laptops. Almost everything is plastic. Flexing lids, creaky keyboards, cheap hinges. An aluminum MacBook at $599 would feel dramatically better in hand than anything else at that price.

Display runs roughly 12.9 inches using IPS technology. Brightness works fine indoors but probably won't match the MacBook Air's Liquid Retina panel quality.

Actual Colors Finally

Yellow. Green. Blue. Pink. Alongside silver and dark gray.

MacBooks haven't done this in years. iPads get colors. iPhones get colors. MacBooks stayed boring silver forever. Now apparently that changes.

Makes complete sense targeting students. Younger buyers care about color. Education buyers want affordable hardware. Combine both and suddenly Apple competes in conversations it currently loses completely.

Still Many Unknowns

Battery life? Nobody leaked reliable numbers. Port selection? Unclear. Storage options? Unknown. RAM configuration? Unconfirmed.

For a laptop purchase these gaps matter hugely. An aluminum $599 MacBook with only one port or mediocre battery life would frustrate people fast, regardless of how good it looks in yellow.

March answers everything. Until then, Gurman's track record gives these rumors more credibility than most.