Laptop shoppers may be happy to hear that Apple is cutting $200 from
the price of its lowest-end retina MacBook Pro, bringing the price down
to $1,499.
The Cupertino, Calif. firm announced Wednesday that it had
dropped the price of the starting MacBook Pro, with 128 GB and a retina
display. For a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a slightly faster processor and
more memory, customers will have to pay $1,699.
The company also said that it would update the processors in its
larger laptops, popping a 2.4 GHz quad-core processor in its mid-range
15-inch MacBook Pro and a 2.7 GHz processor in its highest-end model.
The MacBook Air with retina display, a 13-inch laptop with 256 GB of flash memory, also got a price cut to $1,399.
Apple
refreshed its laptop line in June, and reported sales of its computers
had dropped in the last quarter of 2012, down 22 percent from the
previous year.
Analysts have raised concerns that Apple products
could eat into each others’ sales, a trend known as cannibalization. The
computer market hasn’t weathered the trend toward tablets well, and
some saw the drop in Apple’s Mac sales as a sign that its success with
the iPad comes at the expense of its strength with laptops. Now, they’re
worried that the iPad mini will erode iPad sales.
But in remarks Tuesday, Apple chief executive Tim Cook
said that he believes the Apple “halo effect” will insulate against too
much cannibalization, though he did concede that the iPad may have
taken out some sales of Apple’s laptops.
Apple customers, he
noted, tend to buy multiple products within the ecosystem — being able
to share apps and data from your iPhone, after all, could make the iPad a
much more appealing purchase.
He said the PC market still seems
to face much more of a threat from the iPad than the full-sized Apple
tablet faces from its smaller sibling, however, and that Apple has to be
in the smaller tablet space to stay competitive.
“If we don’t cannibalize it, someone else will,” he said.
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