Everyone waiting for a new MacBook Pro to be delivered can take heart from a report that Quanta Computer has restarted assembling Apple notebooks. This comes after its assembly plant in Shanghai had been temporarily closed as part of the Chinese government’s attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19.
In the meantime, though, wait times for top-tier MacBooks now stretch into July.
I’m just waiting on a MacBook Pro
The 2021 MacBook Pro is a powerful computer, with either an M1 Pro or M1 Max processor and the return of an HDMI port and SD card reader. But lengthy wait times continue to frustrate plenty of potential customers.
There’s new hope on Tuesday. “Quanta Computer’s plant in Shanghai, China is gradually resuming its production of Apple’s MacBook products with order pull-ins also slowly turning strong, according to sources from the upstream supply chain,” reports Digitimes.
Quanta is the only company that assembles high-end macOS notebooks. So a mid-March COVID-19 lockdown near its Shanghai plant was very bad news for Apple … and anyone waiting on a MacBook Pro.
Limited assembly of Apple computers at the plant might have restarted in late March, according to an analyst who’s a reliable source for Apple insider info.
Even when Quanta can resume full operations, it’s likely to be months before it can catch up with demand, though. An order for many configurations of the 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro placed May 3 from the online Apple store won’t be delivered until between June 23 and July 8.
