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

[ghettochris]

Not very green making laptops that can't be upgraded-- or buying one. I hope to get a decade out of my MBP and keep my money.

They make them so they can be recycled now, not upgraded. Still green.

lol, a decade? I start getting annoyed with my computers getting slow after 3 years, having a fast computer is worth the little extra money to me. Budgeting $2-3 a day can get you a new machine every 2-3 years, not wasting time waiting for old computers is worth that much to me.

 

[macs4nw]

Maybe, but man, only 100 bucks extra for retina? Only the most uninformed (and legally blind) of the general public would pick the low ball number. I wonder the percentage of sales is at the bottom?

Plus that non-retina version is still stuck on IvyBridge, with it's shorter battery life, and those 4000 graphics, and of course lacks TB.

But for $100 less, that thing apparently still sells to a dwindling number of those who like the 500 Gigs of storage and those who must have the built-in SuperDrive. Fwiw, it does have a couple of extra legacy ports as well.

By it not having had any upgrades, or even spec bumps for close to two years, it's pretty obvious Apple just wants it to go away.

 

[alvindarkness]

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?

Weird. I've already moved to two larger SSD's and more ram on my late 2011 15" MBP. Really like the 1680x1050 screen too. I know I'm almost certainly in the minority, but I'm going to try and hold onto this laptop as long as possible, as the retina options at the moment dont interest me in the slightest. Although I do appreciate the good battery life in haswell MBA's.

 

[SBlue1]

Maybe, but man, only 100 bucks extra for retina? Only the most uninformed (and legally blind) of the general public would pick the low ball number. I wonder the percentage of sales is at the bottom?

100?? Its 600 bucks more to have 500 Gigs of HDD.

 

[Roadstar]

And even further, is adding RAM really such a substantial upgrade?

In many cases, yes it is. And it's not upgradability alone, but I pretty much prefer the possibility of swapping out e.g. a broken hard drive/SSD without paying massive service fees. I've done upgrades/component repairs to pretty much all laptops I've owned over the years. It'll be sad to ditch an otherwise fine laptop when a single (typically user-replaceable) component breaks down.

 

[oldmacs]

Being able to upgrade and easily repair a laptop is important... and You can upgrade both the HDD and the Ram in the 13 cmbp. Ram upgrades are an essential upgrade often since Apple skimps on the ammount of ram they include.

Apple need to rename the 13 inch cMBP the 'Macbook' an bring it up to 2014 standards. Not everyone wants/needs/can afford SSD and Retina displays.

----------

They make them so they can be recycled now, not upgraded. Still green.

lol, a decade? I start getting annoyed with my computers getting slow after 3 years, having a fast computer is worth the little extra money to me. Budgeting $2-3 a day can get you a new machine every 2-3 years, not wasting time waiting for old computers is worth that much to me.

Recycling then making a new computer would use a lot of energy, as opposed to getting a longer lifetime out of a computer. I expect to get 6 years at least out my my Macbook Pro, and I am a power user. Thanks to upgrades this is somewhat doable. Most people don't have the money to buy a new computer every 2 years, when they could pay $50-100 to get their ram doubled and performance increased.

 

[Wanted797]

Retina MacBooks look great but I can't imagine having one. I love my MacBook Pro and being able to max out the RAM and put in a SSD has kept it excellent for the last 3 years and likely a few more to come.

Sad to see the last of Apple upgradeable laptops dissappear

 

[solamar]

Breaking news

The Sun rises tomorrow! ..... maybe?

 

[Gudi]

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?

I give you one.

There will be an all-new Mac mini in Mid-Late 2014 (probably not before July). It will be a complete redesign around the use of PCIe SSD only, without any 2.5" drive bays in it. So it will shrink some 20% in width and depth, not only in height. It will lose Firewire and Infrared, but gain a second Thunderbolt port and the ability to run up to one 4K display, when from Apple branded as the funny-superlative 30" Apple Retina Display.

None of it's parts will be user-replaceable or user-upgradable and the base price for the Mac mini will rise by $100, but it will be the best consumer desktop money can buy for years to come. Consumer satisfaction will explode, but sales numbers won't grow much and profits will remain stagnant, so the stock market will worry. Yet the Mac market share will rise, with self-build PCs taking a big setback in developed countries.

How do you like your personal rumor?

 

[Macboy Pro]

This always seems to get down to a debate over retina or upgradeability. Its NOT. Apple can EASILY produce a retina MBP with upgradeability. But why don't they? Then you do not necessarily have an obsolete Macbook Pro in 3-4 years. You can revive it with more memory or faster drive/ssd. You don't have to pay the extraordinary prices for their upgrades at the time of purchase.

The truth of the matter is that this FORCES obsolescence and much lower resale down the road. This financially helps Apple on the long term. On the short term, they force you to pay the ridiculous prices to get larger storage and RAM options straight from Apple.

Its a total money grab and Apple should be ashamed.

For the record, I realize other manufacturers solder their RAM but please remember that a 15.4" macbook pro runs about 1.5x-2.0x as much in cost and they. We should expect MORE for our money.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Oh my lord you're right I forgot. It's from 2006 at least, jesus christ Apple.

I must be one of the legally blind. Having such high resolutions on a TINY TINY 13" screen just doesn't impress me in the slightest, especially when the only thing Apple does for 90% of the time is pretty much scan-double everything, which only gets you slightly smoother edges and is hard to see any difference just doubling the size on tiny tiny 13" screens. Plus it takes up a whopping larger amount of GPU power and Apple has piss poor GPUs. Overall, I find Retina to be a massive big deal about nothing. Yeah, so screen resolutions have increased a bit. Big deal. It's a horrid 13" screen. I had a larger screen on an Amiga in 1991 and I was straining to read the 8-point text in 640x480p as it was. I wanted larger screens, not smaller ones and Retina seems to be all about tiny tiny screens (iPhones, iPads and 13-15" notebooks). Perhaps that's because larger monitors have had higher resolutions for YEARS now and you can actually make good use of it there. It's like people watching HDTV on a 7" pad and thinking they're in a movie theater. Sorry, I haven't been to a movie theater where I sit 12 inches from a 13" screen. That's hardly IMAX.

My 2008 15" MBP has that 1280x800 resolution. I can't hardly use any higher resolution without scan-doubling like Apple does because the text would be WAY TOO SMALL to be usable. But WTF is the point in scan-doubling? It's just an illusion. Now if you have photos or something that are higher resolution and it actually lets you see the resolution rather than just doubling a LOW resolution, then it might look a little better with your nose on the screen, but nothing changes the fact that you're looking at these TINY TINY screens. In fact, Apple ditched their 17" notebook that had a beautiful screen for a notebook. No, that's too darn big, apparently. Too big? I've got 28" monitors here and they're hardly too big. People must enjoy shoving their noses into the glass. Wait until you need bifocals and see how much you enjoy an iPhone screen then.

Yeah, all these people whining about how it's time Apple goes all Retina and I bet most of them watch 32-48" TVs and call it home theater. The eye's ability to see higher resolutions decreases with the size of the screen relative to its size. Thus, having 1080p on a 48" screen sitting 20 feet away does you no good at all. Your eye can't see the resolution at that distance. It might as well be 480p or 720p at best. But the sales guys want you to believe you can see it. The same is true with Apple. You have to put that screen pretty close to see any real differences at really high resolutions. But you've got a forum full of people that think they can see aliens on the moon from their back porch. Frankly, I'd rather see better GPUs in Macs than useless higher resolutions that drag the crappy GPU to its overheating point. I've got real use for faster GPUs. I have little use for a 13" screen I'm going to leave closed when docked anyway.

 

[newyorksole]

Actually, I agree a lot with this. I had the money to choose between both the non-Retina and Retina 13-inch models about a year ago, and as foolish as it sounds, I went with the 13-inch non-Retina (digging through my forum history on here reveals some really exciting "debates" i had with people ). I went with it because I just love the upgradeability - if the battery goes wrong, that's a simple iFixIt purchase to make. New RAM, new SSD, everything's cool.

Lol when will people realize that Apple is not aiming at YOU. They're aiming at the average, non-tech savvy consumer. I wouldn't be surprised if only 20% of Apple users actually cared about the computer being upgradable.

Apple makes a boatload off of average consumers, not forum posters.

 

[oldmacs]

HA! I know a lot of average Apple Users.. and guess what! The majority don't care about Retina displays.. they care about having the space to store there stuff and a reasonable price! At Uni today I saw at least a 100 Mac users... about 25 percent had a Macbook air and the rest Macbook Pros... maybe 1 or 2 retina Macbook pros but the rest had Macbook Pros without retina displays.

 

[gnasher729]

Maybe, but man, only 100 bucks extra for retina? Only the most uninformed (and legally blind) of the general public would pick the low ball number. I wonder the percentage of sales is at the bottom?

Retina display has always been _cheaper_ than non-retina with the same configuration, except that Retina forced you to buy a more expensive configuration; mostly SSD instead of HD.

 

[benwiggy]

I bought one on the non-Retina MBPs last month precisely because I thought Apple might be scrapping them. They're brilliant machines.

Thunderbolt, USB3, SD card reader and FireWire and Ethernet. Best of all worlds.

I've already replaced the drive with an SSD and added 16Gb of RAM for much less than Apple would have charged me.

I can take out the ODD when discs finally become obsolete, just to save weight or add another drive at some point in the future.

And it's still got a Kensington lock hole, which the new ones don't have. The CPU is decent for Creative Suite and other reasonably heavy apps.

Retina, Schmetina.

 

[gnasher729]

Whatcha mean add a Retina Display?
They already have a Retina 13"
Do you mean add Retina to the current, bigger build?
It says that they would be phasing it out in favor of the thinner retina models.

Would love for them to have kept the older designs and add retina to them. I don't care about the optical drive itself, but I care about the room inside for a 2ndary hdd.

Exactly that. A MacBook that looks exactly like the old MacBook Pro but with a retina display. Still all the space for a cheap hard drive or two. _Maybe_ an option where you replace the optical drive with more battery, or with a physically tiny SSD drive + battery.

 

[newyorksole]

Who cares? It generates traffic.

I really don't know why websites don't do this. Having a list of what Digitimes/WSJ/NYT etc has been right/wrong about would help all of us better predict what Apple will/won't be doing.

It's actually a very smart idea...

 

[Santabean2000]

Count me in as one of the bummed customers on this one.

I do like the retina screen on the new models, but that's about it. Maybe it'd be different if there were a plethora of aftermarket SSD blades to swap in, but there aren't and won't be.

Flash is just too expensive still and will be for a while yet. And I loved the dual sata connectors (after pulling the optical drive) that the old models offered. So much flexibility.

Yes there are external alternatives, but nothing beats the elegance of a single device that does it all.

---
For the record, my 2012 MBP 13" with dual SSDs and 16GB RAM still goes strong, except for the battery, which is down to about 77% health - but then that's an easy swap for a replacement; no glue here!

 

[KohPhiPhi]

No brainer, about time. The 13" range has had a number of overlapping models. I still believe that the MBA 13" and the MBP 13" are kinda redundant.

 

[Stella]

Thin as possible.

Its getting to a point of form over functionality. Non replaceable ram - on a Pro machine. Absolute Joke.

MacBook Pro is misleading. They can no longer be classed as a Pro machine ( and probably haven't been for a while ).

Having to take your laptop for a battery replacement, and be without it for a few days while its being serviced, is a farce. Especially for a so called "Pro" machine. You depend on that machine for work.

Sure thin is nice... but there are too many sacrifices being made.

If the Macbook Pro is aimed at the average consumer then by that, it isn't a Pro machine.

 

[Ploki]

In many cases, yes it is. And it's not upgradability alone, but I pretty much prefer the possibility of swapping out e.g. a broken hard drive/SSD without paying massive service fees. I've done upgrades/component repairs to pretty much all laptops I've owned over the years. It'll be sad to ditch an otherwise fine laptop when a single (typically user-replaceable) component breaks down.

It used to be, is it *still*? For an average user. For a Professional users, when RAM gets in the way probably everything else will too.

You can swap the SSD board yourself. As far as RAM malfunctions go, I hope they don't happen. If they do I won't be happy. So I'll agree with you on repairability points for RAM. But so far, more "repairable" old MBPs have failed due to faulty GPUs (non repairable) than retinas have on dodgy RAM.

 

[dumastudetto]

Consumers have spoken and they don't want clunky old non-Retina MacBooks. Just like they didn't want the 17" MacBook Pro. Apple is right to kill them all off and focus on the innovation they are driving in the new Retina range of products.

 

[peterh988]

Lol when will people realize that Apple is not aiming at YOU. They're aiming at the average, non-tech savvy consumer. I wouldn't be surprised if only 20% of Apple users actually cared about the computer being upgradable.

Apple makes a boatload off of average consumers, not forum posters.

I recall reading somewhere (about the iMac) that 83% of users do nothing more than take it out of the box and use it. Of the rest, the majority is taken up by people doing nothing more than sticking extra RAM in, so it would seem that for most users, upgradability is very low down the list of selection criteria.

 

[PreacherKane]

I bought one on the non-Retina MBPs last month precisely because I thought Apple might be scrapping them. They're brilliant machines.

Thunderbolt, USB3, SD card reader and FireWire and Ethernet. Best of all worlds.

I've already replaced the drive with an SSD and added 16Gb of RAM for much less than Apple would have charged me.

I can take out the ODD when discs finally become obsolete, just to save weight or add another drive at some point in the future.

And it's still got a Kensington lock hole, which the new ones don't have. The CPU is decent for Creative Suite and other reasonably heavy apps.

Retina, Schmetina.

I bought a refurb 15 inch non- Retina Macbook Pro's from Apple store myself this year. Absolutely beautiful and works like a dream!! Don't need Retina display and SSD yet.
I know innovation is king but what about choice? As the consumer, don't I have the right to want to choose the machine that is right for my needs? And don't they have to provide me with the choice? Before they change or discontinue stock?

 

[Kebabselector]

I'm waiting for the Macbook plastic version to come back.


That said my 2006 Macbook flies since dropping an SSD in it.