U.S. students will be glad to know that Apple has quietly cut prices on two 13-inch MacBook Pros by $100. Eagle-eyed 9to5Mac readers first spotted these price drops on Apple’s “Shop Mac for Education” online storefront yesterday, which tends to offer better prices than what’s available to consumers at retail stores. The site is still showing the same prices today so the price cuts are here to stay.
Student pricing for the entry model 13-inch MacBook Pro is now $1,000, which is $100 less than its original price tag of $1,100. A non-student would have to pay $1,200 for the same unit (though Best Buy is also offering a $70 discount as of this writing, so you only have to pay $1,130). What you’ll get is a laptop powered by a 2.5GHz, third-generation Intel Core i5 processor, a 13-inch non-Retina screen, 4GB RAM, a 500GB standard hard drive, and seven hours of battery life.
If you want a faster processor under the hood, the other non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro is also on sale for $1,300 – $200 less than what consumers pay for the same device. With the more expensive MacBook Pro, you get a 2.9GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, a 750GB hard drive, and a 13-inch non-Retina display.
With Apple’s annual WWDC conference just weeks away, and Intel due to formally launch its line of fourth-generation Haswell chips at Computex next week, it’s likely that Apple’s dropping its prices to make room for potential new MacBook Pros we could be hearing about very soon. In fact, more discounts might be coming to computers with the third-gen Ivy Bridge processors, so you might want to hold off on buying a new machine until after WWDC wraps on June 14.
