Either way, it's hard to explain clearance of units, then having them for sale again at just a small discount. Maybe closing warehouses and easier/cheaper to just fire sale them? There's got to be a reason...
Not really. BestBuy's Macs (the whole line up) is pragmatically permanently on sale. For the past year or so, it actually would be unusual if they were not. It is usually a nominal percentage discount, just to be under the listed price at the Apple store.
About the only time a Mac model isn't on sale is just after release if Apple is having initial supply problems so they are scarce.
Microcenter tends to do something similar with just a subset of the Mac line up ( usually the faster moving models ). And with in store only deals move "last year's" models at deep discounts.
In a large number of locations, BestBuy has to compete with retail Apple Store. If the prices as exactly the same BestBuy doesn't really have much leverage in that context. Even in the "no store for 30 miles" context folks take trips. One of the strange aspects to the "store within a store" is that the locations aren't repair certified. There are Apple trained sales folks but no "Geniuses" ( hyperbole aspects of that label aside).
As Apple Retail increasingly becomes a Juggernaut, the other resellers have to discount just to stay in the game. Apple puts them on a treadmill where their sales targets are always moving to larger numbers. They have to move product just to maintain ability to sell them. If there is no combined service+sales offering then all you have is price as a value add or that there is no Apple store for annoyingly long distances.
Over time that latter doesn't work so well. The Apple Store has done extremely well in part because Apple wiped out the areas were the larger, more successful local resellers were located. They knew where there were higher density of Mac buyers who buy on a regular basis and dropped stores
exactly on those spots.
Maybe the website maintainers are just lazy because the OS version is still tagged as being OS X Lion. If they are still shipping Lion boxes (eligible for upgrade) they had a giant bucketful of them to get rid of.
If Apple has "minimal order" levels on them to maintain classification, BestBuy might have had to order more because of an Apple imposed deadline. I doubt they actually wanted more in that case.
It would be another "bad' PR blow for Apple if "out of stock" on Mac Pro was just pervasive at a major supply here as it is in the EU Market.