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Apple to Reportedly Stop Production of 13-Inch Non-Retina MacBook Pro Later This Year

this is their last model with an optical drive, right?

it'll be nice to finally get completely rid of those, except for the one time a year someone gives me pictures or files on a CD...
 
booo!

I love my Macbook pro 13 inch...

Last expandable laptop, last laptop with reasonable HDD space + a SSD upgrade path (or both), last laptop with firewire and ethernet built in, last Macbook with an optical drive. Last affordable Macbook pro, especially for uni students.
 
Goodbye old friend

wilf+ugh.gif
 
So wish they would have left the macbook pro as the 'do it all' laptop, with onboard ethernet and an optical drive. Let's face it the Pro is not supposed to be the Air, it's supposed to be a laptop that can compete with laptops used for 'work'.

And for those of you saying use an adaptor for ethernet, etc., I have a rMBP and the thunderbolt ethernet adaptor has a tendency to work loose. I've never had this with an ethernet cable.

Style over substance. If I wanted a very thin and light laptop, I'd buy an Air.
 
Honestly.. they need to put Haswell in it and offer a hybrid drive version and it would be good!!

I bought my Macbook Pro 13 inch in September 2012 and have installed a 8GB of ram and a 750GB HDD.... to get a Retina version of this (Admittedly with 1 tb not 750gb) it would be A$ 2,859.00... vs $1350 it has cost for me to buy the Macbook + do the upgrades.
 
yjchua95 said:
As laptops get thinner and thinner, soldered parts will soon be prevalent among manufacturers. People are complaining about the non-upgradeability because Apple's the first one to do it, but other manufacturers will follow suit soon on their copycat MBAs or rMBPs.
Click to expand...

That's fine, except Apple needs to significantly reduce the price if they expect people to buy a new one every few years.
 
Marhowl said:
Don't throw arguments at me that the 15" retina has better resolution and therefore is better than the old 17" because you probably don't know anything about screen's real estate. Oh, and it had antiglare option

I take good care of my early 2009 2.93GHz 17" which I maxed out and it's running flawlessly. I could hardly imagine replacing it for any retina MBP, even these days
Click to expand...


Everybody is not you,

I absolutely hated my 17 and flipped it for a 15 retina and love it.

I could give two craps if you use it for video or whatever, not everyone gave a rats behind about the overweight, oversized 17 incher, Apple moved on because it was a lost leader, end of argument.
 
Marhowl said:
They axed the 17" in June 2012 without much explanation. Only that it comprised 1% of their laptop sales.

Then they axed the 15" recently in October 2013

It was obvious they are going to do the same to the 13". It didn't even receive the haswell update, which is big a shame. I do have to admit here, that you get a better value out of 13" retina MBP at this point.

Oh yes, and the 1% of laptop sales which were the 17" MBPs were bought by professionals who really needed it for their work.

Don't throw arguments at me that the 15" retina has better resolution and therefore is better than the old 17" because you probably don't know anything about screen's real estate. Oh, and it had antiglare option

I take good care of my early 2009 2.93GHz 17" which I maxed out and it's running flawlessly. I could hardly imagine replacing it for any retina MBP, even these days
Click to expand...

In absolute agreement with your post. I have a 2011 17" MacBook Pro which is running perfectly. I dread the day when I will have to upgrade. I guess I'll have to lug around an iMac?
 
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the non retina 13" still out sells the rest of the line up though. Price and its disappearing features talk. But it's time has come. For me, 95% of the time I'm hooked up to a 27" Cinema display, so retina is not a selling feature. I love it on my iPad mini and 5S though. Maybe a few years down the road I may go retina. :cool:
 
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So after this transition, Apple is finally leaving behind:

- Mechanical hard drives.
- Laptops with Ethernet connectors.
- Compact disc players/recorders.

I may be biased and a hopeless Apple fanboy, but I think this clean slate simplifies things and pushes the industry forward. Apple has clearly waited for USB 3.0 sticks of hard drive sizes to become common for a smooth transition, and 1 TB external drives with USB 3.0 interfaces are almost given away these days. $60. 60 bucks!! And that's well-known brands like Western Digital.

Still, yes, these are external solutions, and the mechanical drive was internal. This minor nuisance (although having a major advantage too: portability) will however only be here for possibly this year or so. After that, the Mac SSD sizes should double once again -- if not already this year -- and then we're quickly moving towards 512 GB - 1 TB SSD's.
 
Prediction: The entire MacBook line is going to be revamped in autumn.

----

The new MacBook Fixata - where even the power cord has been glued, soldered and quantum fused to the now even unibodier chassi. "Our customers tell us this is what they want," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a prepared statement. "The response has been overwhelming. We've shipped, er, been paid for, an absolutely incredible number of these lightning fast glued machines. We're shipping them as fast as we can, and our consumers just can't get enough of our new glue. You might say it's addictive."


----
 
My mum has a 15" with DVD but in the 2 years she has owned it the DVD was used maybe twice since the initial set up and install of some programs.

I agree it's not good having RAM and other parts soldered in but I guess they are all doing it with thing laptops, that said SSD is the future. I just wonder how much longer Apple will bother making an external DVD drive when most others on the market will work with OS X.
 
If things keep going as they are, we'll end up with this:

Retina: MacBook Pro 13" and 15"
Non-retina: MacBook Air 11" and 13"

Makes perfect sense, given the current MBP and MBA screen sizes.
On the other hand, maybe we'll be looking at this lineup in the near future:

Retina: MacBook Pro 13" and 15"
Non-retina: MacBook Air 12"

The non-retina 12" MacBook Air would replace both the 11.6" and 13.3" MacBook Air models and it would be priced somewhere between the 11.6" and 13.3" models. And there probably won't be a Retina MacBook Air for years, until the display panel costs are low enough and their power consumption is low enough for an ultra-slim battery. Just a thought.
 
It sucks they are doing it, but I can understand why they are. Its time. ThunderBolt and USB3 will replace now legacy ports, like FireWire.

Apple seriously needs to bump up the standard RAM on the 13" Retina. 4GB. Really? Common. It can NEVER be upgraded, and your stuck with 4GB?
 
Oh well pretty much as expected. Hopefully they keep the price low as possible and 8 gig machines can be bought off the counter from the resellers. That's all.........no sorry I'm going to have to add a boo to this move as well. Boo!
 
johnnnw said:
Can't wait until the only Macbook I can buy is non-upgradable.


I can't express how much I hate that this soldered stuff has happened. I'll take a little thicker body and non soldered RAM instead of this soldering because it's so thin stuff.
Click to expand...

You know, the only thing you can upgrade in it is RAM. Everything else you can never get it to be as fast as in the rMBP.
Even the SSD, if you shell out for dual-raid setup, you won't get as fast as a single PCIe drive. GPU i won't even go there.

And the price difference is 100$.

I wish you people would stop whining about things that aren't really as bad as you make them look. Get a desktop if you want to upgrade. And even on desktops, you can't swap things that you could 10 years ago. Eventually your computer becomes obsolete, how soon depends solely on your needs and your ability to maintain a steady system.

johnnnw said:
I badly want a Retina but I can't stand the thought of how it affects the resale value once minimum RAM requirements are higher. The machine becomes useless if it's just constantly paging out and getting bogged down. Or if I had it for an extended amount of time I would want to be able to upgrade it when it got to be an issue.
Click to expand...

The speed of PCIe drive is insane, a little paging doesn't really affect the performance nearly as much as it does on an HDD.
Frankly, since most of the population (and this is the cheapest apple laptop) still works on HDDs, jumping to PCIe SSD is a big upgrade. Speed of SSDs also diminishes the need for ram a lot. You don't need everything open because it opens in less than a second. But you need to change the way you think about computing...
By the time RAM becomes an issue, everything else will, too.

I'm sorry, i just don't get how someone can do professional work on 8gb of RAM, while people can't browse web on it. Incomprehensible.
 
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Funny how we can get a rumor as specific as this about the non-retina macbook pro but we can't get one for the mac mini?
 
johnnnw said:
Can't wait until the only Macbook I can buy is non-upgradable.


I can't express how much I hate that this soldered stuff has happened. I'll take a little thicker body and non soldered RAM instead of this soldering because it's so thin stuff.
Click to expand...

How often do you upgrade your laptop? And in a broader sense, how much of all laptop customers REALLY upgrade their laptops in its lifetime?
 
It's almost as worthless a prediction as reporting that new iPhones will arrive sometime this year.
 
yjchua95 said:
About time they did that.

As laptops get thinner and thinner, soldered parts will soon be prevalent among manufacturers. People are complaining about the non-upgradeability because Apple's the first one to do it, but other manufacturers will follow suit soon on their copycat MBAs or rMBPs.

The non-retina 1280x800's pixel density is pretty pathetic anyway, and optical discs are so last century. So are spinning HDDs.
Click to expand...

I used to care about upgrades, spare batteries, and repairs, back in 2000, but since then I haven't used or missed extra batteries, and nothing has broken, and I just use stuff for 2-3 years and sell it and upgrade. Most of what broke for me in the past was cd drives or floppy drives anyways. I like to upgrade every 2-3 years and sell the old while it is still in good shape and has value, Haven't even had to change out a battery in any iphones or ipods. :cool:
 
It's just the way it is. No use fighting it. I'm all for losing the optical drives & spinning HDs. The soldered ram does force one to spend more money upfront to future proof....which kinda sucks...but then, I tend to upgrade my laptops sooner than my desktops anyway.
 
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