Apple Orders Production of 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina Display

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is getting the Retina treatment, according to NPD DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim. Production is already underway, he said, which means we can expect the computer to launch before this year’s holiday season.

Shim tells CNET that “production has begun of a 2,560-by-1,600 pixel density display that will land on a 13.3-inch MacBook Pro,” adding that he is certain this is not a MacBook Air.

“The supply chain indications are that it's for a MacBook Pro 13.3 -- not a MacBook Air,” says Shim.

The manufacturing of the actual Retina displays employed by the new MacBook Pro is currently being handled by Samsung, LGD, and Sharp, says the analyst, who expects the production volume to be a lot higher compared to the current 15.4-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

“With 15.4 it's production of a few hundred thousand units versus one to two million for the 13.3,” he says.

“It depends on how the yield rates turn out,” he adds. “If the yield rates are really good and they're at 70, 80, 90 percent, then they'll probably be in the million and a half range,” he says.

Shim believes Apple is putting a lot of faith into Samsung for the manufacturing of the best displays. Ironically, the two companies just finished battling it out in court, with the latter being forced to pay in excess of 1 billion dollars (around €840 million) in damages.

“With Samsung, if you look at the new [Retina] iPad, they had fewer issues reaching the higher resolution requests from Apple. They were the first vendor to get to volume with that panel,” says Shim.

Apple currently sells a 15-inch version of the MacBook Pro with Retina display. The system is expensive, to say the least, retailing for $2,199 for the base configuration with 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, 8GB of memory, 256GB flash storage, Intel HD Graphics 4000 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory.