“Does Best Buy know something we don’t?” Brooke Crothers reports for Forbes. “The retailer continues to offer hefty discounts on the 12-inch MacBook as the March 21 Apple event nears.”
“The discounting began back on February 26 and is now entering its third week: $300 off most models,” Crothers reports. “So, why the extended discounting at Best Buy? I asked Dustin Downs, an analyst at San Diego-based Gap Intelligence, which specializes in retail activity at electronics retailers like Best Buy. ‘The $1299 shelf price may be a little high for what the model offers,’ he said, referring to the regular price of the entry-level 12-inch MacBook. ‘It seems hard to justify spending anywhere near $1299 for a notebook of this processor caliber just for its ‘sleekness’ when there are similar 13.3-inch offerings from Apple with i5 processors for $999 and lower,’ he said referring to the lower-performance Core M processor used in the 12-inch MacBook.”
“Downs doesn’t know if it’s just slow sales or clearing inventory for a new model,” Crothers reports. “But the timing could point to a model refresh on March 21 or sometime in the weeks or months after that.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The next-gen MacBooks have our names all over them!
The moment the MB was released the pricing scheme didn’t make sense.
I’ve turned several clients away from it and to the MBA based upon value/specs alone.
That’s great, but I’d like to see an entire product line update, not just the MacBooks.
We’re actually surprised that a $1300 netbook with one port was a failure?
Consider it part of incompetent Cook’s legacy!
😛
Can you give us the sales figures please so that we can all congratulate you on how wonderfully insightful you are into both technology and people it seems. Wow a veritable genius at work.
Just eff-off with your stupid comments. We’re not in court for you to cross-examine and demand “give us the sales figures so we can congratulate you”.
If you call bull then call it. Don’t sound like a whiney, passive weed with your passive-aggressive crap.
looks like aggressive-aggressive is you M.O., sen, and the other poster just a spewer who won’t back up blather with fact
probably the same coward…
Well, allow me to butt in.
FACT: Best Buy has been holding a sale to move slow inventory, the 2015 MacBook netbook.
FACT: Apple does not release specific sales figures for individual models.
SPECULATION: If anyone did present analyst estimates for MacBook sales here on MDN, then schmucks like you would refuse to believe any bad news anyway.
OPINION: The MacBook is one of the stupidest design decisions Apple has made. It’s not a great value, even at $300 off.
It’s pretty silly comparing a MacBook with a MBP, I don’t know where this guy is coming from. I own both, and the MacBook is on a completely different level in terms of technology. The MacBook is pure magic in terms of how much computing power is packed into a thin slice of metal, there’s really nothing out there to compare it to. I consider it Apple’s showpiece technology device in terms of engineering prowess.
Shoving a low power Intel netbook chip into a wafer thin chassis with no ability to do anything but web surfing and email is not progress. Nobody is asking for a Mac that feels like an iPad. If you have any performance or usability requirements of any kind, you would reject Ive’s latest FashionBook. It’s overpriced and underperforming no matter how you spin it.
I use my 12″ macbook for everything…. EVERYTHING i need and do every day
so why have you pushed your life into a corner? (that ostensibly includes a desktop powerhouse?)
Or are you talking about your job?
What comprises EVERYTHING in your world?
I hope you understand that your 2015 MacBook that has the performance roughly equivalent to a 2012 MacBook Air, and less than a 2011 MacBook Pro. Either of which you could have purchased for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, we will continue to use our 15″ MacBook Pros for field work and 2010 Mac Pros and some HP workstations for processing. Time is money.
When it came the wife&I compare the MB to MBA & iPad. The price was too high for the hardware configuration. Even the iPads were a better option.
I suppose it depends on what you intend to do, but even the worst Mac is better than running iOS for many tasks involving content creation or collaboration especially when sharing on mixed platform. iOS has become the bag of hurt that any walled garden can become with too much Apple constraints. That’s why all the best selling software on the iOS App Store is juvenile games. That’s who loves iPads – they are the electronic babysitters for the current generation.