Which New MacBook Pro Rumors Stand The Best Chance Of Becoming Reality? – The ‘Book Mystique
A veritable tsunami of MacBook Pro rumors engulfed the Mac Web this week, indicating that a new product launch can’t be too far off now. With Apple’s obsessive secrecy about such things, predicting specifications and feature sets of unreleased products is almost always mostly speculation and guesswork, and launch timing only slightly less so, although historical precedence can be some help there.
A broad strokes consensus regarding a redesigned MacBook Pro (or MacBook Pro replacement) is that it will be thinner and lighter than the current models, whose case design dates back to October, 2008; that the new models will be powered by Intel’s new Ivy Bridge family of Core 1 CPUs; and will lose their internal optical drives in order to facilitate a more svelte form factor and perhaps also free up internal room for greater battery capacity.
Beyond that, it gets trickier to predict, but rumors of a Retina display and USB 3 support in particular have been gaining traction over the past several weeks, both of which will be newly supported by Intel’s Ivy Bridge silicon. I think USB 3 is pretty safe bet. My inclination would be skepticism about ultra high resolution displays were it not for the intensity and volume of rumors affirming that Retina display Macs (not just MacBook Pros) are coming.
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If Retina-grade screen resolution it is, I have definitely mixed feelings. While better image quality is nice to have in the abstract, the qualifier is what the cost will be in terms of hardware overhead and bandwidth demand, especially with the increased emphasis on Cloud computing these days.
The example of the New iPad with its Retina display is not reassuring. Despite the fact that it has some 42 percent greater battery capacity than the iPad 2 and a quad-core graphics engine as opposed to the preceding model’s dual-core GPU, Apple’s newest iteration of the iPad is slower, has shorter battery life, offers essentially no improvement in task performance, takes about 42 percent longer to recharge, runs hotter, and is thicker and heavier than the still available iPad 2. And the larger size of Retina display optimized apps eat up both bandwidth and data storage capacity. All in support of what amounts to essentially eye-candy.
As Scripting.com’s Dave Winer observed in a recent blog he was an early adopter of Apple’s latest and greatest iPad, back in March, while the ultra high-res Retina display was nice at first, it very quickly became commonplace with “the gee-whiz effect” fading almost immediately and the downside being that he’s always running up against the battery issue with all those Retina pixels sucking down the power, and the bigger battery takes longer to recharge, and the New iPad is noticeably heavier and hotter-running.
Consequently, Winer says he’s started using his old iPad again, discovering that he likes it better than the new Retina unit; it’s lighter, the battery lasts longer and recharges much more quickly, and “Having gotten used to the new iPad, the old one feels like an upgrade!” he declares.
Dave Winer’s experience underscores what has been my take on the New iPad from the outset, and the reasons why I don’t feel hard done by in the slightest continuing to use my 11 month old iPad 2. I’ve been saying since first reviewing the specs for the New iPad that were I shopping for a tablet right now, I would almost certainly opt for the $399 iPad 2. Unfortunately it’s doubtful that Apple will continue to offer non-Retina resolution MacBooks if a Retina resolution revolution is indeed is upon us.
Philosophically, my inclination would be in the opposite direction, willingness to accept somewhat lower display resolution and imaging quality in the interest of speed, efficiency, and a smaller bandwidth footprint. Speaking of which, according to a report last week by The Globe and Mail’s Paul Taylor, mobile operators in the are already scrambling to keep pace with a mobile data tsunami that threatens to overwhelm their networks, with data overload and spectrum crunch key themes at the wireless industry’s recent CTIA conference in New Orleans due growing popularity of data-hungry online video streaming and downloads. Increased use of Cloud computing combined with greater bandwidth demands of higher-resolution optimized data can only exacerbate the problem and slow performance.
Nevertheless, a shift to Retina resolution in MacBooks is enthusiastically anticipated by some, with 9To5Mac’s Mark Gurman calling it the most important Mac innovation in years — the culmination of years of research and development in ultra-thin mobile computing and super-high-resolution displays — based on reports from Far East sources familiar with the quality of new MacBook Pro screens in test-production that enable users to adjust sharpness and image sizes. At least that would allow dialing down resolution somewhat to enhance performance. HardMac’s Lionel references evidence that we might soon see Retina display Macs found in the latest OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion beta indicating 1920×1200 standard resolution, but user switchable to as great as 3840×2400.
As for form factor, contrary to a dominant rumor mill consensus that the new 15-inch MacBook Pro will draw heavily on the industrial design of the late-2010 (current) MacBook Air, Gurman says his sources familiar with the prototype units say that will not in fact be the case, and that the new 15-incher will be more along the lines of an ultra-thin, yet more robust, version of the current MacBook Pro design without wedgie tapering like the MacBook Air has.
Gurman agrees that the optical drive will be out, leaving users dependent on the Mac App Store or other online download options (ie: more bandwidth) for software installation, and obliged to buy an external optical drive if they need backward compatibility for software and data archived on DVDs and CDs. In general however, he predicts that the new Pro’s general layout will continue with ports arrayed along the sides, including a MagSafe charging port, two USB ports, two audio in/out-sized ports, and the battery meter on the left side and two Thunderbolt ports, an SD card slot, and another USB port on the right, but no Ethernet port and especially if those USB ports are upgraded to USB 3 spec., as anticipated now that Intel is finally incorporating native USB 3 support in their new ivy Bridge CPU — FireWire probably a goner as well. USB 3 offers less than half the data transfer speed of Apple’s Thunderbolt I/O interface, but is supported by a much wider range of devices, in most instances at significantly lower prices than T-Bolt gear. Digitimes’ Josephine Lien and Steve Shen say that IC design house Genesys Logic has reportedly received USB 3.0 card reader controller chip orders destined for new MacBook Air notebooks in the second half of 2012, according to industry sources.
Gurman says graphics card support has not yet been finalized from among several different graphics chipsets, but he’s seen direct references to NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M graphics card which NVIDIA claims offers both lively graphics performance and battery-life efficiency while the CPU choices will likely be one of Intel’s several quad-core i7 Ivy Bridge mobile processors, including several with a low thermal profile.
AppleInsider Staff also say a Retina display MacBook Pro is coming, possibly to be unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference that runs June 12 to 15. The Appleinsider folks also say their sources maintain that what sounds like a dedicated system-software-only flash memory module will be used to speed up boot times and extend battery life. That would presumably be in tandem with a rotating platter hard disk drive in order to support professional grade on-board data storage capacity at affordable cost, although all-SSD alternatives will doubtless remain available for those so-inclined.
A report by The Register’s Chris Mellor cites storage industry research firm TrendFocus predicting that thin and light laptops will increasingly use hybrid disk drive setups that combine near-SSD speed with traditional HDD capacity at substantially lower cost than with pure SSD solutions, noting that storage drive industry heavyweight Seagate thinks hybrid drives will eventually enter every part of its product portfolio. Hybrid drive arrangements sound to me like the ideal way to go. We’ll have to see if Apple agrees.
One rumor that I think has virtually zero likelihood of becoming reality is that the new MacBook Pro could have a Liquidmetal case instead of the aluminum used in all Apple laptops since the demise of the last polycarbonate enclosure MacBook last year. inquisitr.com proposes that the Macbook Pro 2012 redesign may utilize Liquidmetal construction, referencing a recent blog by SlashGear’s Chris Burns reporting he’d received a tip from an anonymous source claiming to have seen Liquidmetal technology being used in an Apple device much larger than an iPhone, and saying that while a vague tip, anonymous to boot, wouldn’t normally be something he’d cover, “the possibility that this could be the next big MacBook Pro feature is just too perfect not to consider.”
Liquidmetal alloy technology was developed by a California Institute of Technology research team that later organized themselves into the Liquidmetal Technologies firm. Apple paid $20 million for exclusive licensing rights to Liquidmetal Technologies’ “amorphous metal alloys” in 2010.
Theoretically, replacing the expensive and demanding process of machining unibody housings from a single billet of aluminum with Liquidmetal casting should be significantly cheaper and faster than machining for volume production, and combined with Liquidmetal’s other desirable qualities such as high tensile strength, excellent corrosion resistance, very high coefficient of restitution and excellent anti-wearing characteristics, the upside for both Apple and for end-users could be substantial.
However, earlier this month AppleInsider reported that Dr. Atakan Peker, who discovered and developed the formulation that later became the Liquidmetal amorphous (moldable) metal alloy is guessing it would take hundreds of millions of dollars and over three years for Apple to ready the technology necessary to mass-produce large products, such as laptop enclosures, made from the material, saying in an interview with Business Insider that Apple is most likely years away from using the alloy in large-scale projects, noting that there is “no suitable manufacturing infrastructure yet to take full advantage of this alloy technology.”
Someday maybe. Even likely. But not with this coming MacBook Pro release, folks.
The Geekbench benchmarking site has posted a reference, possibly referring to the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, to a ‘MacBook9,1’ with a quad-core Intel Core i7-3820QM Ivy Bridge processor operating at 2.7.0 GHz and running Mac OS X 10.8 (Build 12A211) hitting a GeekBench score of 12,252 – compared to an approximate score of 10,500 for the Core i7-2860QM Sandy Bridge processor used in the current MacBook Pro.
You can check it out at:
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/664125
As always, we’ll have to wait and see. My provisional take is that thinner, lighter form factors, goodbye optical drive, and Ivy Bridge power are virtual certainties, and USB 3.0 highly likely. Beyond that, a Retina display revolution is seeming more plausible, and the MacBook Pro would be a logical product on which to launch it, although my personal misgivings outlined above remain.
As for release dates, I won’t be surprised if Apple rolls out a new MacBook Pro before the WWDC in mid-June, although a WWDC new notebook release would be consistent with precedent as well if we go back far enough (1999 specifically).
Rumors notwithstanding, Apple will still no doubt manage to surprise us as usual, which is part of the fun.
