Apple Cuts Pricing on MacBook Pro with Retina Display and SSD Upgrades

Earlier this morning Apple announced a combination of price cuts and spec updates to its MacBook Pro with Retina Display lineup. The price cuts impact the 13-inch rMBP, while the spec bumps extend across almost all models.

The good news is the price of the base and upgraded 13-inch rMBPs have dropped to $1499 and $1699, respectively. The 15-inch model remains untouched. The upgraded 13-inch rMBP configuration has a slightly faster Core i5 CPU (2.6GHz base clock instead of 2.5GHz, I believe this is a Core i5-3230M). The faster CPUs are nice to see, especially since that's really the only way to improve UI performance at this point until Apple brings some more software tweaks to OS X.

On the 15-inch side, both configurations get a 100MHz faster base clock (i7-3635QM and i7-3740QM most likely). The upgraded 15-inch model now comes with 16GB of DDR3L-1600 by default.

While default storage configurations don't change, SSD upgrade pricing does. The 512GB and 768GB SSD upgrades drop in price a bit depending on what configuration you're looking at. For the upgraded 15-inch model, moving to a 768GB SSD is now a $400 upgrade. That's not a lot for a 768GB drive, but it doesn't take into account the cost of the base 512GB SSD you are paying for but don't get to keep.

Overall these are welcome changes to pricing and specs. It was clear from the start that the MacBook Pro with Retina Display would eventually fall down to more reasonable prices, and this is likely the beginning of that curve. As high DPI displays become more commonplace, we'll see continued decline in the pricing department. These price cuts do come several months before the introduction of Haswell based rMBPs. Haswell's impact on the rMBP should be greatest on the 13-inch model, where the improved GPU performance will be able to make up for the fact that there's no discrete GPU (assuming Apple integrates Haswell GT3e silicon). You'll also see modest gains in idle power consumption, but the big platform battery life gains really come with Haswell ULx chips which we won't see until closer to the end of the year and will be used in tablets/convertibles.