MacBook Pro Price Cut And Hardware Upgrade Coming Next Year Tips Analyst

It's only been a few days since the new MacBook Pro notebooks were unveiled. If you want to know what we thought about the 13-inch MacBook Pro, check out our review of the notebook. It's hardly time for more upgrades, but analyst King-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities is already looking at what Apple has in store for next year's models. According to Kuo Apple will both upgrade hardware on the next version and cut prices.

Kuo notes that Apple tends to price its MacBooks higher when a new generation launches and then reduce prices down the road the following year. The analyst expects to see price drops for the MacBook line during the second half of 2017. Kuo thinks that as the USB-C market matures and as the Touch Bar matures people will be more likely to upgrade.

Hardware upgrades are going to include 32GB of RAM in the second half of 2017 according to Kuo, but that depends on if Intel launches the Canonlake processors in time. Kuo goes on to note that the Canonlake CPU with LPDDR4 RAM slurps 15-25% less power than current CPUs and will allow that power savings to be allocated to more RAM.

If these new Intel processors launch later than expected, Kuo expects to see Apple move to Coffee Lake processors using LPDDR3 RAM with the most RAM offered being 16GB due to power constraints. This fits in with Apple's Phil Schiller stating that Apple didn't offer a 32GB RAM offering on the new MacBook Pro because of power consumption.

SOURCE: 9to5mac