Sunday, February 20, 2011, 01:20 pm

Apple partner Best Buy listing 5 new MacBook Pro SKUs and price points

By AppleInsider Staff

Best Buy, one of the largest resellers authorized to sell Apple's Mac family of products, is listing this weekend five new stock keeping units for Mac notebooks at price points ranging from $1,199 to $2,499.

The SKUs turned up (via Engadget) in the specialty electronics reseller's online Laptop Configuration tool, where they are listed as "New SKU" with availability of "Coming Soon."

Although Best Buy's inventory systems have been a less-than-precise indicator of Apple's actual plans in the past, this weekend's listings do provide specific pricing information that has yet to turn up elsewhere.

Specifically, the retailer's configuration tool specifies that the forthcoming Apple notebooks will be priced at $1,199, $1,499, $1,799, $2,199 and $2,499. Those price points could coincide nicely with previous reports that peg the new MacBook Pros to arrive in five retail configurations as opposed to the existing six.

Based on those reports and the new price points, it appears most likely that Apple will continue to offer two configurations of the 13-inch MacBooks ($1,199 and $1,499), a single 17-inch configuration ($2,499, up from $2,299), and consolidate the three current 15-inch configurations ($1,799, $1,999, and $2,199) into two configurations ($1,799 and $2,199), shedding the $1,999 15-inch configuration.

The chart below compares Apple's existing MacBook Pro lineup with the potential future lineup, which is based off reports over the last several days that have identified five new Mac part numbers making the rounds in international retail channels at the unconfirmed prices listed by Best Buy in the U.S.


For more on Apple's impending update to its MacBook Pro family, please see AppleInsider's MacBook Pro information archive. Meanwhile, captures of the potential new MacBook Pro SKUs and price points listed by Best Buy can be seen in their entirety, below.