Now that the dust has settled on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro lineup, I wanted to share what I took away from the announcement.
First of all, I was really hoping that this time around we were going to get MacBook Pros sans optical drive. At least, an option on a built to order special where you could opt to remove the optical drive in favour of an extra SSD or traditional spindle hard drive. It appears that Apple just wasn’t ready to take such a bold leap with their main MacBook lineup.
What’s interesting though is these new models seem to be a stepping stone to some major new things. There are three substantial upgrades in these new notebooks that are worthy of talking about. Intel’s latest core i5/7 (dual and quad core) processors (replacing the now ancient Core 2 Duos), AMDs latest discrete Radeon GPUs with 1GB of insanely fast GDDR5 ram, and Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is rather interesting in that it seems to be aiming to replace older connectors. Considering you can power your latest Apple Cinema display and daisy chain that to other Thunderbolt capable devices, it seems that we may have a future where Macs will have one or more of these ports and nothing else.
I’d like to deal with just one robust connector and be able to daily chain 6 devices together, and have them all powered by the same bus to boot!
It’s going to take some time until we get there, but I I’d like to think that I know Apple well enough by now that they’d prefer users to deal with just one type of robust connector and not several inferior ones (cough USB cough).
I kind of went off on a tangent here, but if you want to get rid of your current optical drive, you can get one of these babies and swap in a SSD or large hard drive for extra storage. Pretty sweet if you ask me and I’ll certainly be doing this on my late 2010 MacBook Pro.