rMBP Price Drop

[MICHAELSD]

Price drops to $2000 with the next major release. Prediction but likely.

 

[laurihoefs]

Price drops to $2000 with the next major release. Prediction but likely.

What is this prediction based on?

Component prices have not dropped, in fact some are more expensive than a year ago, and rMBP has reportedly a lower margin than many other Apple products.

Competing products with similar configurations are also priced at the same level as the rMBP, so there is not much pressure to lower prices. Note, that quite often the starting prices that get quoted are for basic configurations, that are of a lot lower spec than the rMBP basic configuration. For instance the new Dell XPS 15 starting price is ~$1500, but that gets you no discrete GPU, a 5200RPM HDD, an i5 CPU, and a 1080p display. Nvidia GPUs, SSDs and hi-res displays are options, and they aren't going to come cheap.

IMHO it would not make any sense to drop prices, but one can always wish, of course.

Edit: now that I think about it, you migt be on to something here. A new base model without discrete GPU, and with i5 CPU might quite realistically be close to $2000. Well, we'll see soon enough 😀

 

[Fontane]

Price drops to $2000 with the next major release. Prediction but likely.

Why don't you properly title your thread: "Prediction - rMPB Price Drop"

Otherwise, people think you're reporting news of a price drop.

 

[Starfyre]

Why don't you properly title your thread: "Prediction - rMPB Price Drop"

Otherwise, people think you're reporting news of a price drop.

It would be nice, but I for one wasn't expecting news of a price drop. Anyone can see that Apple wants money, and component prices just arn't there yet.

 

[UBS28]

What is this prediction based on?

Component prices have not dropped, in fact some are more expensive than a year ago, and rMBP has reportedly a lower margin than many other Apple products.

Competing products with similar configurations are also priced at the same level as the rMBP, so there is not much pressure to lower prices. Note, that quite often the starting prices that get quoted are for basic configurations, that are of a lot lower spec than the rMBP basic configuration. For instance the new Dell XPS 15 starting price is ~$1500, but that gets you no discrete GPU, a 5200RPM HDD, an i5 CPU, and a 1080p display. Nvidia GPUs, SSDs and hi-res displays are options, and they aren't going to come cheap.

IMHO it would not make any sense to drop prices, but one can always wish, of course.

Edit: now that I think about it, you migt be on to something here. A new base model without discrete GPU, and with i5 CPU might quite realistically be close to $2000. Well, we'll see soon enough 😀

Components haven't dropped? I can buy a 1 TB SSD from Samsung that is faster than the SSD's Apple use and much cheaper than what Apple charges. RAM is cheap. CPU is cheap since it's an outdated CPU replaced by Haswell several months ago.

Only the screen could be expensive but the costs should be lower now than 1 year ago.

Apple is quite known for having higher margins than the competition if you look at iPhones. And it's not R&D costs since Samsung has 3 times more R&D costs than Apple.

 

[clyde2801]

I don't think there will be a price drop until the components become cheap enough, and apple has the will, to drop the classic non retina product line.

Sort of what happened to the macbook air, going from the premium underpowered CEO laptop in 2008 to the entry level model starting in 2010 and apple dropping the plastic macbook.

 

[laurihoefs]

Components haven't dropped? I can buy a 1 TB SSD from Samsung that is faster than the SSD's Apple use and much cheaper than what Apple charges. RAM is cheap. CPU is cheap since it's an outdated CPU replaced by Haswell several months ago.

You know, you are comparing apples and oranges. What I wrote was not about possible price drops for current rMBPs, but the yet-to-be-released Haswell machines (and I assume that's what the OP meant too). You are also comparing retail third party HDD prices to Apple OEM upgrade prices, neither of which have much to do with rMBP margins.

Some things to consider, when making estimates of the Haswell rMBPs price:

Competing products are priced similarily.
RAM prices are up
Haswell SKUs are pricier than Ivy Bridge, compare the prices of Ivy Bridge vs. Haswell mobile parts.

On the other hand NAND and rare earth metal prices are down.

Only the screen could be expensive but the costs should be lower now than 1 year ago.

Better yields improved the availability of Retina displays, but there is no information, whether the screen in Haswell rMBPs will be the same as in Ivy Bridge machines. And it's still a hugely expensive part, likely the most expensive single part of the whole rMBP.

Price drops of other old parts (CPU, GPU, chipset, etc.) would be relevant only if the parts used in the new rMBP were the same as one year ago, but they of course are not. New parts -> new prices.

Apple is quite known for having higher margins than the competition if you look at iPhones. And it's not R&D costs since Samsung has 3 times more R&D costs than Apple.

Huge margins in iPhone have not much to do with rMBP margins. There were several estimates of the 15" rMPB margins floating around back when it was introduced, and they found its margins to be even lower than those of other Apple laptops, which are also not much higher than in the industry generally.

About the R&D, Apple works quite closely with, for example, Intel and display manufacturers, who invest heavily in R&D, which Apple in it's turn then pays in component prices. The Retina displays are a good example of this.

Comparing Apple R&D investments to Samsungs is also comparing apples to oranges. Samsungs range of products is something quite different from that of Apple, ranging from chemicals to semiconductors, and everything in between. It's a company that develops tech and parts for not only it's own consumer products, but for other companies too. It's actually one of the companies that has made many of Apples ICs and displays, so historically Apple has paid a part of Samsungs R&D in component prices. This is to change of course, as Apple is shifting the production of both ICs and displays to other manufacturers.