“Apple made an interesting move a couple of weeks ago when the company announced that it would be cutting prices on a number of its MacBook models,” Ashraf Eassa writes for Seeking Alpha.
“In particular, Apple reduced the price on the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro from $1699 to $1499, and cut the price of the 13″ MacBook Air from $1499 to $1399,” Eassa writes. “At first, I thought nothing of it, but then I started wondering if this represented the death knell for the 13″ MacBook Pro. So, will Apple get rid of the 13″ MacBook Pro?”
Eassa writes, “The only real differences here are form factor (the MacBook Air is thinner and lighter) and clock frequency on the CPU. Now, this difference shouldn’t be brushed aside lightly; the difference between models is anywhere from 44% to 50% and CPU performance scales almost linearly with clock speed. The MacBook Pro is markedly faster, but it comes at a financial and form factor cost. However, that distinction has been getting blurrier and blurrier in each generation, and I believe with Intel’s ‘Haswell,’ Apple will be able to finally consolidate its 13″ models to simply the Air.”
Read more in the full article here.