Analyst: Apple to discontinue flagship 17-inch MacBook Pro

KGI Securities’ “research analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has in the past offered accurate information on Apple’s Mac product roadmap, recently took on a new position with KGI Securities and has published a new report today indicating that Apple may be preparing to drop the 17-inch MacBook Pro from its lineup due to weak sales,” Eric Slivka reports for MacRumors.

“Kuo’s prediction comes as Apple is expected to introduce new notebooks that serve as a hybrid between the current MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, offering greater power than the Air but greater portability than the Pro,” Slivka reports. “Kuo believes that Apple will elect to drop the 17-inch size as part of this revamp in order to streamline the company’s product offerings.”

Slivka reports, “According to Kuo’s estimates for the first calendar quarter of 2012, Apple sold roughly 3.1 million notebooks, with nearly half of them being the 13-inch MacBook Pro, far and away the company’s best-selling Mac product. But while Kuo predicts sales of nearly 1.5 million units of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, he sees much lower sales of roughly 500,000 15-inch models and only 50,000 17-inch models. Kuo estimates Apple’s first quarter MacBook Air sales at roughly 1.1 million, split nearly equally between 11-inch and 13-inch models.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: We used to use 17-inch MacBook Pro units as or desktop/mobile computers. Things have changed dramatically. iPad, for one. For another, MacBook Air. We believe it makes more sense to put iMacs on the desks and, when going mobile, to be as mobile as possible, which is why we use 11-inch MacBook Air units (our favorite Macs – ever) along with our iPads. So, we didn’t purchase 17-inch MacBook Pros last go-round. We assume a lot of Mac users made the same move, significantly affecting sales of Apple’s biggest MacBook Pro.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]