* Apple doesn't even offer interchangeable hard-drives on their
desktops (except for the MacPro) - and considering interchangeable hard-drives are a rarity on laptops anyway, I wouldn't be holding my breath.
* The latch could certainly switch to the MacBook style, I agree that it would be better - but that's more of a minor change than a re-design.
* Ditto for the keyboard
* If the display folds back far enough for you, why does it need to fold back further?
* Whilst I can't speak to the structural strength of the current MacBook Pros, I would be surprised if they were less than par for a typical laptop. Extra-strength laptops, like the
Toughbook remain a niche market - hardly appropriate for Apple's flagship laptop class.
* Changing the look just so that it "looks new" is exactly the
wrong reason to redesign a product. If you can offer a superior design, then I'll happily agree with you, but as it stands, the current MacBook Pro design is elegant and clean, and I've yet to see anyone arguing for a redesign actually present any sort of superior design - where are all the photoshop'd fantasies?
I think there are two elements to a redesign... a technological upgrade, and an aesthetic and user-oriented re-think. Sometimes it's a big change, sometimes it's just evolutionary. Often, it requires the new technology to facilitate the aesthetic changes.
It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything especially wrong with the previous design, just that there might be a better way of making the same sort of product.
For an MBP redesign, these seem like realistic possibilities:
Technology:
* Faster processors etc (mobile Penryn? Slight graphics upgrade?)
* LED backlighting on all models, make the screen thinner in the process.
* Higher-res screens? Although looking at how small some of the text in Apple's Pro apps is already, perhaps not. Although in the case of a 13" I'd much rather have small text than too little real estate to be useful. Aperture's cramped enough on the 15 as it is.
* A few tweaks to the I/O (separate, full-speed FW800 bus, pleeease...)
* Possibly (but no better than 50/50 I'd say) some kind of Flash disk caching for faster boot and fewer disk accesses.
Aesthetic changes
* Thinner, lighter components (screen, keyboard) means a thinner, lighter machine
* Sleeker lines - get rid of the cheese-grater speaker grilles and find a way to eliminate the non-matching grey plastic border around the case, use a MacBook-style latch which gets rid of four gaping holes and a button that sticks a lot, use MacBook-style keyboard (which I think looks cooler, unifies it with the rest of the range, collects less crud, and I personally find it super-fast to touch type on.)
* make the hinge go back a few more degrees. I know I don't have a problem with it, but lots of other people clearly do.
* Make that HD interchangeable. Everyone runs out of HD space at some point, especially on laptops where capacity is limited by what the drive manufacturers can manage at the time. Being able to swap it out later on is way better than not being able to.
* We might see some black creep into the colour scheme. Right now I wouldn't say I'm keen, but maybe it would look great, who knows. It's like when they release a new version of a car, initially you think the new one looks ghastly, two years later the older model looks really out of date.
I'm not saying the current MBP isn't good, but certain changes would make it better, potentially much better. I don't understand the argument for leaving it as it is. You have to keep pushing forward, or you get left behind.
