As far as I know, estimated price for old display was $68, $160 for new.
And knowing Apple, they have managed to get a pretty good discount on top of that.
And market sets the price, not manufacturing cost.
Yes and no. Apple knows that they are mainly competing with themselves and that a lot people buying the rMBP are coming from other Macs and would have bought a Mac to replace their old mac even if the rMBP didn't exist.
For that reason, if they reduce the margin on the rMBP too much, well they are losing money since they make less money from their loyal customers and I don't think the rMBP individually has the power to make a lot of people switch to Macs.
It's true though that market will set the cost a bit, but considering that Apple has no competition at all for a laptop like the rMBP (competing laptops are twice as thick and have a 1080p/1200p screen at best), whereas the cMBP does, they could have set margins even higher until competition catches up.
The fact that they keep selling the older cMBP without any price drop and that the rMBP has a fairly reasonable price for what it is shows that they want to push people towards the Retina, and it's logical since it's new their new flagship laptop that make them look like innovators, like Apple likes so much. If it sells more, Retina-enabled apps will be rolled out faster, helping their transition to Retina Macs across all lines.
If they wanted they could have lowered the price of the cMBP a bit while introducing the rMBP at a slightly higher price, that way both would have similar margins. But you know Apple, they like to push what they see as the future and let die what they see as on its way out.
I think your "Market sets the price, not manufacturing cost." would apply much better to PC OEMs, since they don't have the kind of customer loyalty Apple has, especially for Macs.
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For christ sake, is there not an ignore button or something on these forums? I would lvoe nothing more than to be able to hide threads like this from my view. Because all I do is waist my time in them that could be spent making a sandwich or something more productive
Right after they have disabled the downvote button I suggested they make it come back and have an effect. For example, if an OP has less than -10 his thread could stop being bumped to the top everytime someone answers, that way the front page of forums would have less trolls and more relevant content.
Then I've been censored. My post was deleted without any reason.