Analyst calls for 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro in October
updated 03:16 pm EDT, Thu June 14, 2012
Suggests yield, assembly issues stopped intro at WWDC
Apple will likely introduce a 13-inch version of the Retina MacBook Pro in October, claims KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Production is expected to ramp up in September, making an early October ship date possible. Luo, notably, predicted that Apple would kill off the 17-inch Pro, and sell a thinner, 15-inch Retina-equipped model alongside a more conventional Pro design.
Kuo suggests that Apple likely wanted to debut 13-inch Retina systems alongside the 15-inch ones this week, but may have been stymied by low part yield rates and/or greater difficulty in building the design. He predicts that like the 15-inch systems, the 13-inch models will drop any optical drives, and switch to SSDs for storage instead of conventional hard disks. Resolution is expected to drop to 2560x1600, fitting the smaller screen space.
Another step down may be reliance on an integrated Intel HD 4000 chip for graphics, rather than a separate, dedicated video card. CPUs are meanwhile forecast to be from Intel's Ivy Bridge lineup, clocked at a minimum of 2GHz.
