Apple unveiled its highly-touted MacBook Pro with a Retina display last week at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but currently there is only the 15-inch size available. In a few months, however, a 13-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro may join the family as well, reports indicate.
According to AppleInsider, citing one of its own insiders, Apple will lavish its 13-inch MacBook Pro with a high-resolution Retina display as well, and the product update is set to launch within just a few months, in October.
On Thursday, AppleInsider reported, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said he expects Apple to "ramp up production of a 13-inch next-generation MacBook Pro with Retina display in September." If production starts then, the upgraded laptop should hit stores in October, just in time for the profitable holiday shopping season.
Kuo has a good track record when it comes to such predictions. He was the first to suggest that Apple would ditch the 17-inch MacBook Pro model, and that it would sell the 15-inch next-generation MacBook Pro with Retina display alongside the previous-generation MacBook Pro, which has a lower-resolution display but received some upgrades this year as well. Both of those predictions proved to be true this week at Apple's WWDC.
According to Kuo, the tech giant has the "highest hopes" for the 13-inch next-generation MacBook Pro with Retina display. Apple, however, did not unveil it this week at WWDC likely because of a greater assembly difficulty and a low yield rate, he noted.
The 13-inch next-generation Retina display MacBook Pro is also expected to lack an optical drive in favor of size, relying solely on solid-state flash memory storage. Kuo further told AppleInsider that the display will likely sport a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, and will be slightly thinner than its 15-inch brother, at 18 millimeters.
On the other hand, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display will likely not feature discrete graphics like the 15-inch model. Instead, this model will have Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. Furthermore, Kuo expects it to sport an Intel Ivy Bridge processor with a clock speed greater than 2GHz.
When it comes to the freshly-released 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, Kuo expects Apple to have roughly 300,000 units available to sell this month. According to the analyst, this would be a "moderate amount" of units of the next-generation notebook.
