Apple's thinner 13- & 15-inch MacBook Pros expected in April at the soonest

[Doug b]

Any chance of a retina display on the MBP. That would be awesome.

I think the hi-rez (anti glare thank you) one is enough right now. Put an "retina" display on a MBP and expect your battery life to plummet in no time! On an iMac however.... Yeah, I could go for that! That would be a photographers/video editors *** dream.

Doug

[quin]

I think the hi-rez (anti glare thank you) one is enough right now. Put an "retina" display on a MBP and expect your battery life to plummet in no time! On an iMac however.... Yeah, I could go for that! That would be a photographers/video editors *** dream.

Doug

I think it's do-able on a MBP, especially if they will take out the optical drive altogether to make more room for bigger battery with more capacity. I still like to have an optical drive, although I find that I have used it less and less.

[EndlessMac]

After all, there are plenty of ways to compensate for lack of ports with hubs, adapters, thunderbolt, etc. same for the optical drive, with wireless drive sharing.

That's not a good option for me. I like using my computer as a portable device and like how I only need to bring my laptop and battery charger. I don't want to be lugging around a whole extra bag of accessories.

I don't quite get it either. The Air is already filling that market space - if the point is to get more horsepower in a smaller platform - just beef up the Air...don't downgrade the Pro.

You make a great point. I don't understand why they would want to downgrade the Pro and turn it into a none Pro computer when they could just either upgrade the Air or create a whole new category of laptops. Some of us actually use our computers for work and not just to browse the internet or check email.

[MacDude121]

Using the title "Pro" while ditching ports such as Firewire and widdling the USB ports down to 1 would be a horrible idea. First of all, I don't care if you can use a hub, that's not the point. How is it any better to have a thin machine that forces you to carry around hubs and dongles etc? That would be just as inconvenient.

Thunderbolt? At this point, it's good only for a display port. No one but true industry pro's can afford TB storage! Until its proliferation in the Windows segment, we won't be seeing those prices coming down any time soon.

And while we're at it, I really hope that Apple totally revamps the entire structure of the MB line. If we are to see "pro" level graphics and processing power in a MB the size of the Air, then I fear for the life/longevity of the logicboard due to all the heat build up.

Well, hopefully my 4 year old MBP will hold up for another 4 years, because my next machine is an iMac.

Doug

Couldn't agree more. Lately, I've seen Apple trying to move in a "prosumer" direction. The Market is getting slimmer and slimmer for the people that actually need the horsepower/ports/graphics that the MBP can offer. I still don't think the White MacBook even needed to be killed off, it had decent power, enough ports, an optical drive... perfect for the average person.

I, personally, can barely consider a MacBook Air to be a computer at all. No expandable options whatsoever. Maybe Apple can drop that 1 USB port while they're at it and shave an ounce off? I'm sure nobody uses it anyway.

I don't know where Apple is heading, maybe this is all speculation and the new MBP will be great. I have my doubts though...

[SemperFi]

The MBA is designed to be portable, it is not supposed to be a "Pro" machine. But I still believe it deserves some respect considering its size it is very good at what it does. Plus when you add a external display you can get more USB ports, another Thunderbolt, and a Firewire

[infocusinc]

The MBA is designed to be portable, it is not supposed to be a "Pro" machine. But I still believe it deserves some respect considering its size it is very good at what it does. Plus when you add a external display you can get more USB ports, another Thunderbolt, and a Firewire

Only if it is an Apple display. IMO the Apple displays are not a great choice if quality color is needed.

[Lifeisabeach]

I think the hi-rez (anti glare thank you) one is enough right now. Put an "retina" display on a MBP and expect your battery life to plummet in no time! On an iMac however.... Yeah, I could go for that! That would be a photographers/video editors *** dream.

The iPad doubled its resolution, added LTE, and maintained a 10 hour battery life. Of course the battery holds about 30% more juice to compensate, but surely the improvements in battery capacity can be carried over. The pixel density on MacBooks and iMacs is already closer than people realize to what it'd need to be to meet the fuzzy definition for Retina Display, and it's not necessary to quadruple the pixel density to avoid upscaling and interpolating graphics because OS X is not (exclusively) a full-screen OS in the first place. More about all that here:
Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math (updated) | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Personally… I see the optical drive going away; the display increasing in resolution; and the battery capacity increasing. I doubt Firewire is going away this quickly, especially given the dearth of Thunderbolt devices thus far. Maybe the MBP will be thinner/lighter due to space saving from removing the optical drive, or maybe that space will be left as available for an SSD. I doubt they'll use the space savings for a bigger battery… a battery of the same size that is more efficient like that in the new iPad should be sufficient for the relatively modest bump to the screen resolution that would be needed as per the article above.

Of course maybe that speculation is wrong and perhaps Apple will quadruple the pixel density. If they did, that would leave options open for multiple "native" resolutions. Let's take the 21" iMac at 1920x1080. If the resolution became 3840x2160, you could switch to the following resolutions and still look as good as if they were native: 1920x1080, 1280x720, and 960x540. Right now, with a native resolution of 1920x1080, the only resolution that cleanly goes into that is 960x640. A quadrupled density leaves room for an intermediate resolution of 1280x720 that perhaps someone with poorer eyesight would better appreciate. This could also lead Apple to locking in the available display resolutions to those 4 combinations so they can optimize the UI elements in OS X to only work with those. Or maybe they won't. *shrug* We'll see.

[BrianLachoreVPI]

I'd like to see USB 3.0 - and yes - I do think that's possible - even with Thunderbolt on board.

[MacNasty]

[QUOTE=vansmith;1379903]I would have normally disagreed about the lack of an optical drive but since mine is broken, I've gotten very good at learning how to get content without it.



Out of curiosity, what happened to your drive? I recall Apple had big time issues with drivers on some MBP models so severe some disks wouldn't load and you couldn't burn anything. One particular drive model I believe and there was a firmware fix.

As to ports on my portable: I hook up a lot of peripherals so I'm happy with my firewire 800/400 and a couple USB's. When my software doesn't come on or have to be loaded from CD's and DVD's I'll do without the optical drive.

Any thoughts on USB-3?

[vansmith]

I have a four year old MB with a slot loading optical drive - the fact that it's broken was inevitable.

[MacNasty]

I'd like to see USB 3.0 - and yes - I do think that's possible - even with Thunderbolt on board.

The only USB 3.0 Mac OS X driver I've seen was put out by LaCie for some of their new products. They claim a 7 second download on a 700MB video file compared to 25 seconds with USB 2.0. That pretty much exhausts my knowledge of USB 3.0. Does anyone know if Apple has expressed any interest in it?

[MacNasty]

I have a four year old MB with a slot loading optical drive - the fact that it's broken was inevitable.

Well at least it's not a firmware problem. Also it's an easy DIY fix. Did mine in 25 minutes and I'm no techie but I watched a video by one on u-Tube once.

[vansmith]

Well at least it's not a firmware problem. Also it's an easy DIY fix. Did mine in 25 minutes and I'm no techie but I watched a video by one on u-Tube once.

I would but I don't care much anymore. In fact, I rarely used it when it was working. Plus, I'm looking for as many excuses as I can find to get a new machine.

[Hornhonker]

I try to sell these things and a form over function MBP is not going to cut it with customers.

[iggibar]

I don't believe Apple would have a problem upping the screen resolution while maintaining battery performance. They seem to have done that all while adding a 4core graphics processor chip. One thing that I do have a problem with is the "MacBook" part of the name in all of Apple's notebooks. To me, if you have something that further designates a characteristic of a line(Air, and Pro), it should mean that there is a standard option without those features. This is where the regular MacBook makes sense. With it, you can have the MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro. They should have something available that is just simply called Macbook!