If Apple really does bring color back to the MacBook, the hardest part of buying its next “cheap” laptop might not be the specs — it might be deciding between light yellow, pastel green or a soft blue finish. For a company that spent the last decade obsessed with muted aluminum, this rumored budget-friendly MacBook is shaping up to be one of the most personality‑driven Macs in years.

The broad strokes are surprisingly clear for a product that doesn’t officially exist yet. Multiple reports say Apple is preparing a new entry‑level MacBook for launch as soon as March, priced in the $699 to $799 range in the US, with a big focus on students, schools and cost‑conscious buyers who’ve always bounced off that $999 MacBook Air price tag. It’s expected to use an A18 Pro chip — yes, the same class of silicon that powers the iPhone 16 Pro lineup — paired with a display just under 13 inches and a new, more efficient aluminum manufacturing process to keep the chassis feeling like a “real” Mac, not a plastic compromise.

What’s catching everyone’s eye, though, is the color story. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple has tested light yellow, light green, blue and pink, alongside classic silver and dark gray, though not all six are guaranteed to ship. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Apple has quietly been reheating its love affair with color for a few years now: the 24‑inch iMac returned in a rainbow of finishes in 2024, and the latest MacBook Air traded its serious space gray for a softer sky blue. This rumored MacBook feels like the next logical step — a machine that borrows the playful energy of the old iBook clamshells and iMac G3s, but updates it for a generation raised on pastel iPhones and customizable phone cases.

Underneath the paint, the strategy looks very practical. Apple has been flirting with the low end of the Mac market for years, most recently by quietly keeping the original M1 MacBook Air around at $599 for certain channels, effectively testing how far down it could push a “real” Mac price without diluting the brand. At the same time, Chromebooks and aggressively priced Windows laptops have eaten their way into classrooms and corporate fleets, which used to be prime territory for Apple’s education‑focused hardware. A sub‑$800 MacBook with day‑long battery life, Apple’s tight ecosystem integration, and a friendly color palette is a very direct answer to those machines — the kind of device an IT department can bulk‑order, but that also still looks fun on a student’s desk.

The choice of an A‑series chip instead of the usual M‑series is a big part of how Apple can make the math work. The A18 Pro is built for phones, but performance‑wise it’s no slouch; it gets uncomfortably close to what the original M1 could do, especially for everyday workloads like web browsing, document editing, streaming and light creative work. For a lot of students and office workers, that’s more than enough. You’re not buying this machine to compile huge Xcode projects or render 8K video all day — you’re buying it to survive Google Docs, dozens of browser tabs, maybe some photo tweaks and the occasional indie game. By tapping into the same chip line that powers millions of iPhones, Apple can lean on massive economies of scale, reuse established thermal and power profiles, and squeeze out the kind of battery life that makes a school day or long‑haul flight feel trivial.

Of course, something has to give. Early reporting suggests Apple is likely to compromise slightly on specs, ports or display quality to hit that lower price bracket. You should expect a sensible baseline — think 8GB of RAM and modest storage — rather than the kind of headroom you’d get on a higher‑end MacBook Air or Pro. Port selection may be conservative: a couple of USB‑C ports, a headphone jack if we’re lucky, and that’s probably it. The display is rumored to be a 12.9‑inch‑ish LCD, not mini‑LED or OLED, which will keep costs down but should still be sharp enough for everyday use.

What’s interesting is what Apple reportedly won’t cut. Instead of going back to plastic — a move some analysts floated as a way to differentiate from the premium lines — the company is said to be using a new aluminum shell process that’s faster and more cost‑effective than what it uses today on the MacBook Air and Pro. That matters because it protects one of the core pillars of the Mac brand: build quality. Even if you’ve bought the “cheap” MacBook, you’re still getting something that feels rigid, dense and premium in the hand, not a flexy education laptop that looks tired after a year. It also hints at a longer‑term play: once this process is in place at scale for the budget model, there’s nothing stopping Apple from repurposing it for future Airs and Pros.

Then there’s the optics of color itself. On the surface, it’s easy to dismiss pastel laptops as pure marketing, but Apple rarely deploys color by accident. The original iMac G3 and iBook clamshell weren’t just cute; they were strategic, helping Apple break into education and consumer spaces that were dominated by beige boxes and corporate‑looking notebooks. A colorful budget MacBook speaks the same visual language as those products: approachable, not intimidating, clearly not “your dad’s work laptop.” In a sea of identical silver and black machines, that matters. It makes them more visible in classrooms, more Instagramable in coffee shops, and frankly, easier for a teenager to persuade a parent to buy.

Positioning is everything here. Apple already has a fairly crowded laptop lineup, from the MacBook Air in two sizes to the MacBook Pro family. Slotting a new machine underneath the Air only works if it’s clearly different. Color is one big differentiator, but so is the chip choice and the likely branding. Several reports suggest Apple may simply call it “MacBook,” without any suffix, mirroring the way it treats the base iPad. That would tap into a bit of nostalgia — the last 12‑inch MacBook carried that simple name — while also making it crystal clear to buyers that this is the entry point into the Mac family, not a weird offshoot.

For students, there’s another angle: software and longevity. An A18 Pro‑powered MacBook should be more than capable of running the latest versions of macOS and Apple Intelligence features for years, giving it a longer useful life than many budget Windows or ChromeOS machines that feel sluggish after a couple of major updates. For schools, that means lower total cost of ownership; for parents, it reduces the fear that the laptop they buy for high school will be obsolete halfway through university. And because it’s still a Mac, it plugs into the rest of Apple’s world — AirDrop from an iPhone, AirPods pairing, iCloud sync, screen sharing with an iPad — without the friction that can come with cross‑platform setups.

There are, of course, open questions. We still don’t know the exact mix of colors that will make the final cut, or how aggressive Apple will be with education pricing versus retail. Battery claims, storage tiers and RAM options are all still in the realm of leaks and educated guesses. And Apple will have to walk a fine line: push the price too high and it cannibalizes the MacBook Air; push it too low and it risks perception as a stripped‑down “MacBook SE” rather than a full‑fledged computer.

If the rumors hold, though, the bigger story isn’t just that Apple is about to ship a cheaper laptop. It’s that the MacBook is about to get some personality back. A pastel‑yellow notebook on a lecture hall desk is a signal — that this is a Mac built for the people who grew up on colorful phones and TikTok feeds, who want a machine that looks like theirs, not something handed down from the IT department. In that sense, the budget MacBook might end up doing exactly what the original iBook did a quarter‑century ago: make the Mac feel fun again, just in time for a new generation deciding what their first “real computer” should be.