Yeah, they don’t have to hit every price point.
Since they updated the MacBook Pros this year, I’m expecting the new 16-inch model to be sold alongside the other models, and not supplant them (at least not initially). Since the 15-inch model is $2399, I’m thinking the new one is going to be $2999. And then around WWDC, Apple will replace the rest of the line and make the great new Liquid Retina MacBook Pro even more affordable, with a 16-inch model at $2499 (really a stealth $100 price increase) and a new 14-inch model replacing the four-port 13-inch Pros at $1999 (a $200 increase). Because they want everybody to be able to have this great new design. How nice of them!
I think it would be fine if the MacBook Pro line started at $1999, as long as that computer was worth $1999. (A real GPU would really help.) The problem is, now there’s a ton of people who bought a 13-inch MacBook “Pro” at $1199 or $1299 and they might feel like upgrading to a MacBook
Air would be a downgrade. And I’m sure a lot of people in the media would write articles about how Apple bumped the price of the MacBook Pro up $700, even though that’s not really true.
And this whole mess started because they decided to retroactively re-declare aluminum housings a Pro feature in 2009.
I don’t often find myself wistful about Good Old Apple, but I do miss the simplicity of that original 2008 unibody line-up. One size of MacBook Pro. One size of MacBook Air. And one size of MacBook, in either the new unibody or the old plastic guise. The MacBook was the base model for normal people. The MacBook Air was the luxuriously thin model for executives. And the MacBook Pro was the big model for people who needed lots of processing grunt. And it’s hard to believe this now, but that MacBook Pro had a big screen
and a GPU for $1999, instead of $2399…sure, that was a decade ago, but it’s not like the price of every other piece of technology goes up with inflation.