Sales of the 2016 MacBook Pro lineup, along with a prediction from industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of Kaby Lake-equipped MacBooks with 32GB of RAM, have supply chain analysts predicting MacBook sales of over 15 million units for 2017.
According to the Chinese language Economic Daily News, sales year-over-year of the MacBook and MacBook Pro will grow 10 percent. The publication is also expecting to see a decrease in the price of the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, and predicts that it will replace the 13-inch MacBook Air in Apple’s product lineup.
At least some of the optimism has to be based on a prediction earlier this week by KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said Apple would begin building MacBooks equipped with Intel’s latest Kaby Lake processor platform in the third quarter. He also predicted a 15-inch MacBook Pro will be available with both a Kaby Lake processor and 32GB of “desktop class” RAM, to enter production in the fourth quarter of 2017.
While the Kaby Lake lineup of processors are not significantly faster than the Skylake chips they will replace, they are designed to be much more power efficient, consuming less power while offering a slightly improved level of performance.
