MacBook Supplies Tightening at Third-Party Retailers Ahead of Potential Refresh [Update: Mac Mini Too]
AppleInsider notes that MacBook supplies have become "severely constrained" at a number of third-party retailers, suggesting that Apple may be drawing down stocks ahead of a refresh.
Specifically, Amazon, MacConnection, On Sale and J&R are all out of stock. In addition, inventory of the entry-level portable is low at DataVision.
In addition, one of Europe's largest distributors is completely out of stock of the white MacBook, and lists no estimated time of arrival for new shipments. Sources indicated that this is unusual, but not necessarily a sign that the current model will be discontinued.
Shipping estimates for orders made through Apple's online stores around the world remain at "within 24 hours", suggesting that the shortages have not yet extended to Apple's own distribution channels. But shortages at third-party retailers are frequently the first indications of Apple preparing to release updated models.
As noted in our Buyer's Guide, Apple is well overdue for a MacBook refresh as judged by its usual update cycle, having last updated the MacBook in May 2010.
Rumors of updated MacBooks have been essentially nonexistent, although the Machine will presumably make the shift to Intel's Sandy Bridge platform and include Thunderbolt support. And while no specific timeframe for an update has been offered, the line is clearly one of many including the MacBook Air, Mac Pro and Mac mini that are due for an update. Apple has been said to be holding new hardware launches until OS X Lion is ready, and so we may see a flood of new releases once the operating system debuts next month.
Update: AppleBitch reports that Best Buy's online store and Amazon UK are also currently out of stock of the Mac mini. While the shortages are not as widespread as seen with the MacBook, they could be early signs of a drawdown for that line as well, which was last updated in June 2010 with a new design.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
Yeah, the poor people who drop a grand on a laptop, please let me always be poor like that!:rolleyes:
At the $999 price point, the MacBook Air has a bunch of restrictions that the MacBook doesn't, notably:
* no optical drive
* 11 vs 13" screen
* 64 GB vs 250 GB hard drive
I don't understand this. The MacBook is more powerful than the Air (I believe), is more upgradable, more feature packed (dvd drive) and is cheaper than the MacBook Pro. And the only way to get a bigger screened MacBook Air is if you fork up 1500ish.
Take me for example and some other thoughts.
1) I wanted a white laptop
2) At the time, my 6,1 rev model was better spec'd than the 13"MBP at the time.
3) People have preferences, maybe they like the feel and look more than the pro
4) Price, in todays world $200 is still a good chunk of change, esepcially if you don need more ports, etc...that the pro offers.
5) People spend their money how they want
Just saying, I could have easily afforded the extra $200 to get the base pro, but I wanted white, and I could upgrade my RAM and HD on the cheap myself. Now I have a nice macbook with more ram, more hd space, in a package I want. Couldn't be happier. :)