My dream MacBook Pro
I’ve been using the MacBook Air as my main development machine since they introduced the redesign last year. It’s a great machine and I love traveling to and from IndyHall with such a light laptop. With the latest revamp these machines are better than ever sporting some real processor power. Sadly however they kept the max 4GB RAM limitation. If they had improved the processor and the RAM I might have been persuaded to upgrade but alas I’ll stick with my current machine for now.
All this said, I’ve been pontificating as of late about the MacBook Pro line. What could Apple do to make these stand out over the already impressive Air? What could draw people to spend an extra $1000 for something more “Pro”?
More RAM
Would love to see the machines start out with 4GB and be configurable up to 16GB. In a perfect world, this would be a free upgrade for Xcode 4 users.
Drop the optical drive
Apple has no interest in these anymore and taking it out will help make the overall case thinner. In fact, I don’t see optical drives lasting through any of the upcoming hardware cycles. I could even see them dropping it from the Mac Pro line, introducing a whole new case.
Hybrid hard disk system
Maybe as one internal disk or a driver controlling two individual components. A laptop that has both an SSD and a disk-based hard drive that work together, bringing the speed of an SSD system and the storage capacity of a disk-based system. No need to manually have different partitions and manually figuring out what needs to be where — the system will just make it fast. It will be glorious.
HiDPI screen
Apple has been flirting with high resolution on the desktop forever (I hear there were even internal builds of Classic running in high resolution mode back in the day.). With the success of the iPhone 4 high resolution screen and the continued improvements made in Lion, it’s time to make this a reality. Bonus points if they can introduce a new HiDPI 27-inch display to coincide with the update.
Graphic card
One setback for the Air is the complete lack of a dedicated graphics card. For normal usage the integrated stuff works fine. I even run a 27-inch display off my Air without too many hiccups. But a Pro machine needs Pro graphics. I’d love to see Apple’s new MacBook Pros get some modern portable graphics cards so I can suck at Starcraft on the move at 60fps.
Size and weight
The 11-inch Air is 2.38 pounds and it’s 13-inch brother is 2.96 pounds. The current 15-inch is 5.6 pounds, the 17-inch 6.6 pounds.
Even with all this new stuff I think we can expect a new 15-inch to weigh about 4.5 pounds and maybe something like 5.5 pounds for the 17-inch.
Final thoughts
Hopefully I’m not too far off, as this would be an epic machine, worthy of upgrading my current Air to. Sadly this isn’t based off any internal knowledge but just my own personal wishlist. Anything I’m forgetting? If so, let me know in the comments. Thanks.
Posted on: August 7, 2011 – 5:25 PM
Hi. My name is Mike Zornek (
3 Comments
I finally gave in and ordered a 13” MBP, since I really need 8GB of RAM and more than 256GB of storage (I got the 750G drive). It’s a lot heavier than I would like, and I really don’t want the optical drive. I’ll probably replace the SuperDrive with a SSD using OWC’s adapter and use it as the boot drive & applications, with my home directory on the hard drive.
The hybrid disk system would be great. No way would I want to give up my SSD, but I don’t like watching my disk space on my 128GB SSD MBP (work) and 256GB SSD MBP (personal). I’d probably have fits deciding what goes which disk, though … .
Thanks for the feedback guys. One other wish list item I forgot to mention is 3G access. Would love that as an option on the high end laptops as well. Happily its seems like something they are actively prototyping:
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-macbook-pro-with-integrated-3g-cellular-data/
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