Apple discontinues the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro, with sources saying that the 2016 MacBook Pro significantly outsold the 2015 model
Mike Wuerthele / AppleInsider :
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one day after Apple stopped selling the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro on Apple.com — the formal delisting of a machine that had lingered in the lineup alongside the redesigned 2016 model. The reported sales gap matters because it reframes the cut as demand-driven housekeeping rather than a forced retirement.
It also fits a visible pattern in the corpus: Apple has grown quicker to prune prior-generation hardware, having earlier retired the 12-inch MacBook and previous-generation MacBook Air mid-2019, then discontinued the entire 15-inch line once the 16-inch MacBook Pro arrived, and eventually discontinued the Mac Pro outright with no successor planned.
First-order effects
- Buyers lose the last first-party channel to a 15-inch MacBook Pro without the 2016 redesign, leaving that model as the only 15-inch configuration Apple sells.
- Resellers and refurbishers holding 2015 15-inch stock become the primary source for buyers who specifically want the older design.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own sales data — the 2016 model significantly outselling the 2015 — gives the company cover to shorten the overlap window between old and new generations, pressuring customers who wait for a proven design before upgrading.
- The secondary market for discontinued Macs tightens as Apple's pruning cadence accelerates, since each generation now has less time on sale to build inventory depth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple converges on a single current design per screen size with near-immediate retirement of predecessors — a structure that ends with legacy professional machines like the Mac Pro being dropped entirely rather than refreshed indefinitely.
The trend: Apple is compressing the lifecycle overlap between Mac generations, retiring prior models almost immediately after successors ship and, at the extreme, exiting categories altogether.