Apple's next-gen MacBook Pro casing design revealed - Page 2

So, finally, the new MacBook Pro is no longer a figment of rumor-merchants' imaginations. It's real.

Hooray! At last!

A lighter version than the existing model? Design styling cues taken from the MacBook Air including the black backlit keyboard?

It gets better. Fantastic! I will buy one as soon as it comes out.

Anyone care to hazard a guess on the likely specs?

Why don't they also make the optical drive removable like the Powerbook G3. People who don't need the optical drive should be able to take it out and put in a second battery.

Possible processor speeds are 2.53, 2.8, and 3.06 GHz.

And one other thing that doesn't make this appear too "pro" is that if the battery goes bad and you have to use it without a battery, you're going to throw off the balance of the machine because two feet are missing? The MacBook's battery doesn't span the length of the machine to include the feet.

When its in my hands I'll believe it, till then this is all rumour and speculation. Still be nice if a new MBP or MB are just around the corner.

I think it means it's a popular read, not a popular post. If it gets dugg a lot, I think that is to be expected.

Sweet, if I understand all this chatter, there should be a new MBP around the Feb 09 timeframe. This is exactly around the time I can get my "tech refresh" from my company. Now sporting first gen Intel MBP. Beats the heck out of the Dell the government used to subject me to...

I just want to point out that the photograph shows two separate pieces of the aluminum shell. The top piece and the bottom piece minus the battery section are the only things shown. It is not a picture of an assembled or partially assembled MacBook as many seem to think and it does not show the top piece sitting on top of the open battery chamber as AI states. The two separate pieces are sitting on top of a white cardboard box. You can see the white cardboard box between the two pieces. It's not a tablet. Take a closer look at the picture.

So, could this somehow be telegraphing a MacBook Air with a removable battery?

I dunno, I'm dreaming, but why not?

It's been about the biggest complaint.

I say its for Macbook and not MBP, but guess we have to wait

I don't know how anyone could look at the picture and see anything else.

I wouldn't take it as the truth, but I wouldn't dismiss it so easily or resist the possibility that this could be real either.

When the iPhone 3G back shell pictures were leaked, there were plenty of seemingly-sound arguments as to why they weren't real. The same went for the aluminum desktop keyboard. Ditto for the "fat" nano. And yet, we still got those three products, exactly as the advance photos suggested.

Anyway, just one straight seem might look better than the two rectangles for the battery & memory hatches on current designs. I'm pretty sure that the logo insert can be designed to disperse backlight evenly enough despite the apparent reductions.



Absolutely no changes should be needed to support SSD drives. I'm sure you can drop SATA SSD drives in current MacBooks and MacBook Pros, because the modules should fit the exact same profile. I don't think many have done it just because of the cost and capacity drawbacks. Over the next year, it may be a trickle, then gradually grow as more people can afford drives large enough for them to use.

I don't think Apple restricts design changes to only when absolutely necessary, although some updates are probably like that. I think they do it sometimes because they can.

BO-O-O-O-GUS!

Not saying it's not *some* kind of prototype: but that is NOT the '2 halves of a 15-in. MBP'.

I know you guys love it when I do this....

Probably very soon, because I just caved in and bought a new MBP after waiting for a few months

I didn't have much choice though, I'm doing some Cocoa development at the moment and my trusty PowerBook G4 was just too slow. I'm not really bothered about the case design (I like the old design) but I'd be a teeny bit miffed if a faster Montevina-based MBP came out in the next few weeks.

I bet they'll put in a Nvidia 9600M GT

Because it's not 1998 anymore?

I am guessing that slimming down the case will mean that those expecting big gains in the GPU department might be left disappointed?

I think you're right, but don't be too impressed by that. The 9600M is no relation to the desktop 9600.

Nvidia's specs page on the 9600M GT says it has 32 stream processors, exactly the same as the 8600M GT. If we're lucky, it'll be 20% faster. Unfortunately there are no better options.

And bear in mind that Apple is already underclocking the 8600M chips in the MBP to keep fan noise down.

Pretty genius thought hobBIT! Thinking about this, there seemes to be no other option. The middle part simply has to be made of a different material.

Worst case would be fake aluminium like the keys on current models. Black high quality plastics or even ceramics could follow the highly contrasted designline of the iMac wich indeed will be an interesting design. I wont be surprised to see a new MBP with white or black keys like on the new iMac keyboard and a black apple logo on top!

However, I personally would prefer to see a lighter grey or alluminium only MacBook Pro with the backlit apple.

of course there is much faster mobile version - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870

Which will not fit in a 1 inch Macbook Pro.

I have never seen so many gullible people. Wow, new alleged case design made of aluminum! What a great idea! I wonder why they didn't think of that in 2003, oh wait, they already did! The photos are crap.

I love the bogus chart with the case design intro and ending dates. The MacBook Pro case is EXACTLY the same as the PowerBook G4 design since 2003. They didn't retire the design in 2006.

If the MacBook and MacBook Pro share a similar aluminum case, it won't be anything new. It will just look like 2003...again.

Just because it was aluminum all along doesn't mean it's really the same design all along. Pretty similar, but not the same.

Maybe the changes are too subtle for your eyes, but there were several minor changes in the case between the Powerbook and MacBook Pro. Maybe it takes someone that's actually spent time with both to notice the difference.

The design on these pictures, if that is going to be the new one, is hardly the same either, it's a lot closer to the Air styling now. The more significant difference here is that the battery hatch is moved or gone, the same with the memory hatch.

I find that the "strange" battery-compartiment thingy actually makes this picture quite credible. I mean, if someone was planning to fool us all, i think it's very unlikely that he/she would construct an image showing a 3/4 bottom-shell piece.

Anything is possible, i know, there are probably some very bored creative minds out there, but the atypical bottom piece makes me believe this image has a 90% chance to be authentic.

Then there is off course the chance that this is a prototype that will never have any offspring.
But i would counter this argument by saying that making a mold for producing these aluminium shells is way to expensive to just make prototype designs. Prototype designs would cease to exist during the 3D-modelling phase.

Bottom line: can't wait to see the next-gen MBP
This will be in august i guess. After the 3G-effect has worn off.

Certainly plausible. I simply could not come up with a way of dealing with convenient hard drive access through the bottom of a MacBook Pro case without moving the DVD slot to the side rather than the front. This approach seems to involve one SIDE of the case for the hard drive and battery, which would enable them to resolve this issue without, say, losing their trademark screen hinge design.

In fact, if this panel does indeed go right across the front of the computer, it implies slide-out user access for the DVD burner as well as the hard drive and battery. And there's an enticing prospect both for home users and enterprise customers. What has hitherto been a major maintenance issue and serious downtime just becomes another plug-in on a tray, just like a Mac Pro hard drive.

With a side optical drive, will we loose a whole side of ports? Can't put them in the back...hinge...can't put them in the front...battery...so it's going to be one side for all of the connectivity?

No, the idea is you have the opening across the FRONT of the computer (sorry for capitalizing SIDE in my first post, but I did reference the front), and then the hard drive slides out to the front, the battery slides out to the front, and the DVD burner slides out to the front. At least that's how I see it from the leaked photos.

Otherwise, the only way to get user access to the hard drive in at least the 15 inch version would be to put the optical drive on the side like with the 13 inch MacBook, and then you would be losing space for ports. In the 17 there's probably just enough room to rotate the drive 90 degrees so that it slides into the battery compartment like on the MacBook, without relocating the DVD.

I still don't see a convenient docking station solution in this case, but Apple doesn't seem to be much interested in that anyway. The docking "solution" Apple has in mind, if the Air is anything to go by, is to plug in your monitor and USB hub and turn on your wireless keyboard.

I'm waiting for the MBP update before I buy one for college. I check back on AI everyday for news about it. I'm just happy that they put up a story that has nothing to do with the iPhone.

I'd think that we would see about a %30 improvement over the 8600M GT if Apple moved to the 9600M GT. Not much, but when you consider that the 8600M GT already offers twice the performance of the underclocked x1600 in my Core Duo MBP, even that small difference is a nice improvement.

The other, and less likely alternative is that Apple will instead toss in a 8800M GTS, like to what we find in the 24-inch iMac.

...

It's about 2% faster than the current card...

hmm i think u r talking about 9500MGS which has the same core and memory clock as the 8600gt

but both of that of 9600m gt are higher... i think everyone should check out this site for comparison of notebook graphics cards
some1 has posted this before but there you go

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-...ist.844.0.html

Ah ok I see.

Well, meh, it's still a mediocre upgrade. It's a bit depressing to think that in our next MBPs we'll still only be getting 4500 on 3dmark... so much for "Pro".

Sighh.... I might have to get an iMac

iMac... so why do u wanna get a mbp??

yea but i still cant wait to see what they can come up with the new design

4gb ram is definitely gonna happen in the top model right?? but ddr2 or ddr3??

i guess they will start with ddr2 then bump it to ddr3 next yr on the update after...
but i m def gonna buy it once it comes out in the next 2 months

I'm wondering if this will cut down on all of the ports that the current MacBook Pro has. This looks to have an optical drive which is good, because the people who need an MBP are the same people who are most likely to use their laptops for burning discs of images or video while they are either away from the office or without using a ton of attached peripherals.

I can handle the weight saving decisions of the Air, but I want all my features for what is primarily a workhorse machine - it's 3k and it's to last for a fairly long time and to do a lot. I know a lot of MBPs end up in the hands of people who use them in Starbucks but there's lots of people who buy the MacBook Pro (or the Powerbook g4 before it) because it's the most powerful laptop available from Apple. I've used my optical drive in the field many times, as long as you keep a little wallet of writable CDs in your bag you can burn pictures to a disc as soon as they come off your CD after an event. It's much cheaper to be able to burn a disposable CD which you can give away (I don't really mind if a commercial printer gives me my CD back but I would complain if a memory card or portable hard drive went missing) than to risk losing a more expensive storage device.

When I'm at home I have a couple of desktops set up which between let me do anything I can conceive of, but when I'm out I want to have all my devices in self contained boxes, and the idea of dragging an external CD burner along with a bag of camera equipment around does not appeal.

4GB of video RAM or system RAM? All current iMacs and MBPs can use 4GB system RAM right now.

i mean stock ....baby!!

Because portability is extremely useful to me, but I need a proper graphics card, not yesterdays mid range tech. I'll feel pretty humiliated spending $3k on a 17" pro laptop with a 9600M GT ..

If they're tapering the edges maybe it's to allow the central part of the laptop to be thicker, and an 8800M GTS might be possible. Plenty of PC laptops the same price as the MBP have it.

Your melodrama is a bit much. What is todays' mid range mobile chip if a 9600M is already "yesterday's"?

I wouldn't call the iMac portable by any stretch. It is very easy to move, but that's not the point of the product. It doesn't even have a built-in battery other than for the clock.

I know, I mean the portability of the MacBook Pro is useful to me, although it has a grossly underpowered CPU for a pro laptop. In the 17" model I don't see why we should be sacrificing potentially an 8800M GTS or an HD3850 for literally 0.25 inches of thickness. If I cared that much about it being thin I'd get an Air.

I'm with ya on that. My 12" powerbook is 1.18 inches thing and I haven't once found myself wishing they could've somehow made it 1" or .93" for that matter. And mine doesn't even have a nice video card to justify the extra bulk \