analysisMay 19, 20265 mins

e-Waste becomes input

The high-quality enclosure is made through a process in which durable recycled aluminum is pressed into near-final shape using just half the raw material of traditional machining.

Apple even leaned into corporate social responsibility when it came to the A18 chip it puts inside these systems, as it originally used ‘binned’ processors originally intended for the iPhone 16 Pro to drive the five core A18.

These were rejected processors Apple had in hand anyway, and while it has had to order additional chips to cope with demand for the MacBook Air, the original plan meant it got to sell a product based on chips it wouldn’t otherwise have been able to use. Apple has done this before, such as when it put A15 Bionic chips inside the iPhone SE.