Rumor: Apple to halt production of 13-inch MacBook Pro without Retina display this year

Apple will stop production of the old 13″ MacBook Pro in the second half of this year, according to Digitimes. The laptop will then be permanently replaced by the thinner 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina screen. Earlier, Apple discontinued the old 15-inch MacBook Pro.

If production does indeed stop in the second half of 2014, as Digitimes claims based on its Taiwanese sources, it should come as no surprise. Apple only had a single 13-inch MacBook Pro model without a Retina display in its range, which was also not upgraded last year and therefore has to make do with an old Intel Core i5-3210M of the Ivy Bridge generation. Intel Ivy Bridge has since been replaced by the more energy-efficient Haswell platform.The ‘old’ MacBook Pro is no longer promoted prominently on Apple’s website.

The fact that Apple wants to completely replace the old MacBook Pros with models with Retina screens was also clear from the price reduction of the new generation MacBook Pros in October last year. Then the 15″ MacBook Pro without a Retina screen disappeared. Apple stopped using 17″ MacBook Pros altogether in 2012.

Digitimes has a proven track record of early publishing about Apple’s plans, but the Taiwanese newspaper isn’t always right: Digitimes is wrong in some cases. Some of the cases where Digitimes was the first to get it right on Apple rumors involved the iPad mini and iPhone 5c. In both cases, the newspaper was the first to report on the new products almost a year in advance. Digitimes gets its information from Apple suppliers, such as the makers of chips and screens for the Cupertino company.