Apple has said that the MacBook Air is “the next generation of MacBooks” and, in October I wrote a post that details five key areas where the MacBook line-up of 2011 will change.
- Battery life improvements
- SSD as a standard
- Lack of optical drives
- Thinner and lighter body designs
- Higher resolution displays
It was a pleasant surprise to see a blog post from Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper (review) and the ex-lead developer at Tumblr detailing what he thinks is the future of Apple’s MacBook Pro. It’s safe to say that I agree with everything written and would like to dissect a few of his ideas. In Marco’s Speculation on the next MacBook Pro entry, he reviews the future of the white MacBook and 13″/15″/17″ MacBook Pro models starting with the 17″ MacBook Pro:
I don’t foresee major changes to the 17” MacBook Pro. It’s an aircraft carrier made for maximum performance, maximum capacity, and rarely-used hardware features (like the ExpressCard slot) to sell to people who actually need them, such as people operating portable recording setups. When Apple wants to remove features from the rest of the lineup, they can usually appease most of the “We’re still using that!” crowd by keeping it in the 17” for a few more generations.
The 17-inch MacBook Pro is too large for many users but history does tend to repeat itself as Apple offered a non-glossy display on the 17″ MacBook Pro first as a professional option and it still offers the ExpressCard slot as a standard feature and it was first to offer higher clock speed CPUs, larger capacity ram and larger solid state drives. The 17″ MacBook Pro and PowerBook have each offered a bit more for professionals while also having a bit of legacy built in for those users who needed a specific port or feature. He continues:
And that’s where I think Apple’s going to shove the optical drive: the 17”, and the $999 plastic MacBook. That’s it.
and
…the low price of the 13” Air will leave little reason to buy the 13” MacBook Pro, so I’m guessing it will be eliminated from the lineup.
I agree that Apple and Steve Jobs has been on this war path against optical media since the first MacBook Air was released in 2008. Steve showed that you can get most of your content via iTunes and the web and the Mac App Store is showing that we barely have to search all over for downloads of software that we once got on a CD at the Apple Store. The CD software selection at stores is dwindling as well. I think that the MacBook will keep the optical drive for only one additional revision merely because the current design is still pretty new but, soon, our white MacBook will forgo the optical drive and only the 17-inch MBP will have the SuperDrive as a standard feature.
Look at it this way, currently two out of six Apple notebooks lack a super drive. If Apple kills off the 13″ MacBook Pro and removes the optical drive from its 15″ cousin, three out of five notebooks Apple sells will lack the drive and in one year, it’ll be across the board. The juiciest tidbit from Marco is this:
And I’m guessing that the 15” will undergo its most significant change in a very long time: it will adopt the wedge shape of the Air, losing its thick, uncomfortably sharp front edge. Removing the optical drive will free up a lot of space inside, leaving room for a rearrangement that can enable the wedge shape without giving up a significant amount of battery volume.
Ideally, this would come with two other major changes:
- No more glass screen. Glass is much heavier, shows far more glare, and requires a thicker screen lid than the “glossy” plastic screens on the Airs and plastic MacBooks. To make the 15” significantly lighter and thinner, Apple needs to drop the glass. (This isn’t a very strong prediction as much as it’s wishful thinking.)
- SSDs only. This is much trickier in the 15” lineup, but the wedge shape could start out a lot thinner if it didn’t need to accommodate a 2.5” drive bay for a traditional hard drive. This, I think, is the riskiest prediction here: it’d be a ballsy move for Apple’s only hard-drive-bearing laptops to be the plastic 13” and the massive 17”. A lot of 13” and 15” MacBook Pro buyers want a lot more disk space than current SSDs offer at reasonable prices. But the benefits in performance, reliability, and case-design freedom would be huge, and that’s exactly the kind of ballsy hardware move that Apple likes to make.
When Apple called the latest MacBook Air models the future of MacBooks, this is what I envisioned as well. The wedge design would make its way to the rest of Apple’s notebooks within the next 18 months and HDDs would be replaced by SSDs in a shift where HDDs were available only as a built to order option or you could buy the old MBP model for a steep discount while supplies last if you needed the capacity. The issue of price and capacity of solid state drives would be nearly eliminated if Apple decided to equip their future notebooks with eSATA ports allowing for faster transfer speeds to external drives.
In a move that I feel is long overdue, removing the glass layer from Apple’s notebooks would be a welcome change for nearly everyone I’ve spoken to. These screens look great in ads but simply don’t work when you have any light glaring onto the display. However, Apple’s move to eliminate glass would be a backtrack considering their iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and current LED displays all have the same glass screen treatment with a black bezel so it’s a good prediction that I don’t think will happen for a few more years. Marco does argue that removing glass, HDD and optical drive from the 15-inch MacBook Pro could bring the weight down from 5.6 pounds to 4.8 which is only .3 pounds heavier than the current 13″ MBP.
In closing, here is his rumored pricing and line up for our 2011 MacBook family:
- $999 plastic MacBook, unchanged, for econobuyers
- $999 11” MacBook Air
- $1299 13” MacBook Air
- $1599 15” MacBook Pro, new wedge design (down from $1799)
- $2299 17” MacBook Pro, unchanged
I can certainly get behind this sort of pricing but we have to understand that the tradeoffs as Marco illustrates in reducing the amount of ports that 15″ MacBook Pro can have (due to the wedge design) and possible inability to do any sort of CPU speed bump in this revision may make this makeover a bit hard for professional Mac users to stomach but that Apple line calling the Air the future of MacBooks has me thinking that a lack of optical drives, a move to SSDs and a focus on the wedge design may be where we’re going despite the obvious trade-offs. If you have a problem with it, there’s always the unchanged 17-inch MacBook Pro that still has ExpressCard, a SuperDrive and that huge HDD for tons of storage.