Apple's faulty chips are big business for the company – here's how

Apple has for years been using a procedure known as chip binning to reuse faulty chips in other models of a product, or even entirely different products.

A new report gives further examples of cases where Apple has been able to take chips which failed quality control for one product and subsequently use them in another – and says that the practice dates all the way back to the original iPad and iPhone 4 …

Chip binning

We first drew attention to the process back in 2020 when Apple used it for the M1 MacBook Air.

A number of people commented on what appears to be a comical difference in the new MacBook Air specs, between the $999 base model and the $1249 version. While the higher-spec model has an 8-core GPU – also seen in the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini – the base model only has a 7-core GPU.