MacBook Pro not expected to receive any major hardware upgrades this year

Apple’s MacBook Pro, which was thoroughly redesigned in 2016 with Touch Bar, new CPUs, GPUs and storage and more, reportedly will not be seeing any major hardware bumps this year.

Supply chain sources told Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes this morning that Apple’s favorite contract manufacturer Foxconn has been aggressively working to land more notebook orders from Apple during the past few years by offering attractive quotes.

From the report (emphasis mine):

Since Apple has not had a major upgrade to its MacBook product line since the releases of its new MacBook Pro devices at the end of 2016 and has no plan for one in 2018, the US-based vendor is planning to shift orders for models that are already in mass production to Foxconn to save costs and reduce risks.

However, the Cupertino technology giant could still release a minor update to the MacBook Pro lineup this year with updated CPUs and GPUs. Apple should shift a major portion of MacBook orders in 2018 from Quanta Computer to Foxconn, added the supply chain report.

Subscribe to iDownloadBlog on YouTube

Foxconn is expected to begin mass shipments to fulfill the new orders in the second quarter of 2018. Still, Quanta should remain the largest MacBook supplier to Apple in the year.

Digitimes Research’s figures show that the upstream supply chain has shipped around 15 million MacBooks a year to Apple with the shipment ratio for Quanta and Foxconn at around 8:2 for the past five years.

In 2017, Quanta had a 79.5% share and Foxconn 20.5%.

The sources pointed out that Apple started outsourcing the assembly for some of MacBooks’ components to Foxconn’s plants in Shenzhen, China in the second half of 2017.