September 26th, 2008
Rumor Mill: Some juice on the new MBP (updated)
According to what I hear the picture that surfaced briefly on French blog Nowhere Else (above, Tip: ValleyWag) isn’t the new MacBook Pro.
What’s with the weird OS X dock that’s Photoshopped onto the trackpad and the pixelized tapered edge? Is it supposed to be a dual-screen, like the Nintendo DS? Also, why are “spy shots” always shot on blurry cameraphones? Don’t people carry their point-and-shoots any more? I’m sure that you’ll agree that it’s a fake.
I hear that the new MacBook Pro will forgo the drastically tapered edges from the popular MacBook Air design (as seen in the purported “leak” above) and instead stick with a more traditional, pro-like, boxy design. Sources tell me that the new MBP will be thinner and as much as a half-inch narrower than the current model with less bezel around the screen.
My fear: all glossy screens. It would be a major mistake for the MBP design if Apple only ships glossy screens without offering a matte option. Glossy screens will prevent me from buying or recommending them. I can’t stand them, especially on notebook computers that are capable to be used outdoors.
No word on whether the display bezel will be black, as in the photo, but you can say goodbye to the last Apple keyboard with silver concave keys. The new MBP will sport the same black “flat top” keyboard that’s in the MacBook Air as the company continues to standardize parts.
The new MBP’s rumored “glass” trackpad will inherit full Multi-Touch capability from the iPhone and iPod touch. Multi-Touch allows you to pinch and stretch with two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in and out. When I dug a little deeper no one could confirm that the “glass” trackpad is actually manufactured with glass which presumably would pose a breakage problem. People that have seen it say that the new trackpad is “shiny,” rather than the flat, matte finish found on current trackpads.
Some advance-stage MBP prototypes include a slightly smaller trackpad than the one on the current MBP. While this would seem to conflict with Apple’s trend toward using larger trackpad surfaces (as we saw in the MacBook Air) the change in size could be necessary to accommodate the new MultiTouch trackpad (”MultiPad?”) hardware. It remains to be seen if the smaller format trackpad pans out as Apple has been known to build dozens of concept machines.
The biggest boon will come for virtualization software (like Parallels, VMWare) users if a feature spotted on some prototypes comes true. Some MBP development mules have been seen with a split trackpad, which would be a first for the company. The addition of a second trackpad button would be a huge for contextual menus in OS X but even moreso in Windows. The multi-button trackpad has been a long time coming and it’s about time.
While most of the above features we’re spotted in the MacBook Pro is stands to reason that they’ll eventually trickle down to the consumer MacBook too.
Update: AppleInsider is reporting that the new MB and MBP will replace the traditional Firewire 400 port in favor of a backwards-compatible Firewire 800 port and that Apple will replace the traditional 28-pin DVI port with the mini-DVI port from the 13-inch MacBook.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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