MacBook Neo drives Apple notebook shipments up 10% but A18 Pro shortages cap growth

The A18 Pro shortage throttling MacBook Neo shipments reveals Apple’s vulnerability in 3nm yield ramp and advanced packaging capacity. This bottleneck disrupts not only final assembly but also upstream EDA validation cycles and downstream thermal module redesigns. Geopolitical scrutiny—particularly tighter export controls on advanced packaging in Taiwan, China—has inflated compliance costs and accelerated Apple’s partial shift of test operations to Vietnam and mainland China, though insufficient to close the gap short-term. Dell and Lenovo are exploiting this window to push Copilot+ AI PCs into the premium thin-and-light segment, betting on ecosystem differentiation. If TSMC’s CoWoS capacity remains constrained over the next 18 months, Apple may delay HBM integration in future Mac chips and instead double down on software-level performance tuning, redefining how hardware competitiveness is measured in the PC market.