Apple's 15" Ultra-Thin Notebook Due in March 2012

[gri]

Apple has never supported modular drive bays -- or a docking architecture.

Heck they aren't letting you change the battery anymore.

Not true. Some of the early Mac Laptops in the 90s were dockable through a dock sold by Apple, the PowerBook Duo of 1992. My aunt had one and I was jealous... I had a PowerBook 180 I believe, to bad I sold it...

 

[Winter Charm]

I don't think Air and Pro will be merging.
That's coz both categories targets 2 different types of market.

Well, Steve Jobs himself did say the air was the future of notebooks. However, I think you're right about this. It won't be until the 2013 refresh that the lines fully merge.

 

[jlluna]

I would love to have the 15" MacBook air. But it has to have 4 gb of ram, witch i am sure it will,upgradable to 8 would be great.2 USB connections, and a bigger ssd, at a resonable price. 256 ssd it just not enough for all my pictures and documents. I could live with the iTunes on iCloud, but I would really like it on my Mac.all my MacBook pros, are 1tb except for my air, it's only 128' way to small to store anything on. So I really hope ssd prices come down, because they are just to overpriced right now.

 

[AlterEg0]

I like my MacBook Air

http://zenbook.asus.com/
http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/s-series-home

Why pay $1599 for an i5 processor when you can get an i7 for $300 less.

 

[MrNomNoms]

Apologies for the slow response - busy with work and the usual excrement hitting the fan as perusal thus requiring my capable hands to solve the problems as they arose. If I've missed out anyone - apologies in advance but I'm sure I will address it none the less.

It's not about "real men". I gather your knowledge of how expansive things can be and actually are with the Mac Pro in the professional world is limited. One example of what you can't do with an iMac is install third party hardware because you don't have PCI slots. You can't install most of

these products for example in an iMac.

Hence the reason I mentioned Thunderbolt which points to the external PCI cases that are being made available. The question now is whether the these external PCI cases will come down to a price point that the average professional doesn't need to think twice before handing over the cash. IMHO the biggest barrier is the price of Thunderbolt hardware but I guess with volume it'll come down in price but volume really can't be achieved if the price is too high hence the chicken/egg scenario. Maybe Apple needs to step up and start providing said Thunderbolt devices?

The biggest problem with the AIO machines like the iMac is over-heating. If you push the iMac as hard as many "pro" users push their machines, it's known to get very hot easily and in some cases overheat. Plus the fact when you buy a new iMac you have to replace the computer & the screen vs just replacing the computer when you buy a new Mac Pro or Mini.

I've pushed my iMac pretty hard - the problem I find are people whose office environment is already pretty hot, lack of ventilation/air conditioning making a computer that'll get warm to become very hot quickly. If you have to replace the whole box what are you losing? have you looked at the cost of a Mac Pro - they're hardly cheaper than an iMac. Your argument about the ability to keep the monitor only holds water if the iMac high end costed more than a Mac Pro.

Then there's the issue of expandability. Yes, I realize there's TB but it's that ubiquitious yet and peripherals are now starting to trickle out that take advantage of it so there needs to be some transition (not long, maybe like couple of years) until pro users can move to fully using TB.

The big one will be the PCI expansion case and whether it offers equal stability, reliability and quality as putting it directly on the board itself - if it provides that sort of experience at a reasonable price then I could see at least smaller studios transition over to iMac's. At the end of the day though the long term prospect that I see is many studios do their heavy lifting by pushing it off to a datacentre be it in the cloud or on their own premises so maybe that is the other angle that for Apple makes a massive heavy lifting workstation less important these days.

Bear in mind the limitations of an All-In-One. Especially in the film industry, we value storage. And lots of it. Heck, 8 ports aren't enough and many times we're forced to use stacks of externals.

Did you read what I posted? Heard of Thunderbolt? heard of the 'Pegasus RAID Storage with Thunderbolt'? ( link )

Other limitations are the mobile GPUs. The iMac display should really be called the iMirror, few USB ports, speakers are redundant, etc. These features sum it up for the typical household consumer where it suffices.

A Mobile GPU is that much of a crippling experience? please when it comes to crappiness for all the faults of Apple's hardware lineup lets not try to delude ourselves that throwing more hardware at Adobe's crappy software is going to fix the problems you face - maybe your demand should be software that is properly optimised for Mac OS X instead of them demanding you plonk down several thousand on even higher end hardware just to get some decent performance out of their software.

I define 'pro' as any hardware-demanding industry that demands hardware for productivity. Not gamers, not the corporate world. That's my two cents and people will inevitably deny and egg me for it, but meh. Suck it up.

The question is whether there is sufficient volume for Apple to even care in the long run - for every 'pro' such as yourself screaming about the demise of the Mac Pro there are 'Pro's' out there using MacBook Pro's and iMac's to get their work done. Either they're doing something really wrong or you need to evaluate what you're doing.

Changeable highend desktop gpu. The iMac is too thin for it, and thunderbolt is too slow for it.

True, but the question is, like I've said - is it worth their while for Apple to continue doing it? Pro's are now using MacBook Pro to do their work and no one is bleeding out their eyes because of the horrible experience. When your total Mac Pro shipments per-quarter is sitting at maybe slightly over 100,000 does it really make sense dedicating that much time and effort to it?

This just shows a lack of understanding here. It probably lessens the market that couldn't be served by an imac, but imacs are still an inherent compromise. You're locked out of the best hardware. The gpu power in case you do need it is mediocre. Expect that to run off thunderbolt? They aren't anticipating suitable bandwidth for years to run something like a gpu. The current Promise enclosure is much much much noisier than just running drives internally. The imac display is completely flawed for any kind of color grading or anything where color matters at all. Buying a spyder and profiling it won't help (LED backlit displays don't profile well at all).

I have a Drobo device and I haven't seem to have gone deaf because of its fan running - if nose is an issue then put it under your desk, keep it out of the way.

There are so many areas where an imac is just an expensive compromise. It has the internal hardware of a $900 PC shoved behind a consumer grade display providing too much heat for flawless reliability. If pretty much anything down to your hard drive fails, it has to go in for service.

How is this anything but a compromise compared to what we have? A mac mini like device built up a bit for better hardware and port options would make a way better successor to such a machine.

But as I noted further up, the question for Apple is whether the last remaining single digits customers are worth catering for if the over all cost isn't worth their while.

 

[prowlmedia]

Umm..no thanks. Id take windows 8 reasonably priced laptop over this garbage. Tim Cook, you are the beginning of the end! Watch out for Wild Bill. I cant wait to see windows 8 own this, completely. This will be I bet 2 grand! Rip apple, 2k7-2k11

Here speaketh an idiot from PCWorld "It's cheaper and big and thick like me..."

 

[surjavarman]

The above user is trolling. Bumping a 6 month old thread.


Hey buddy why don't you continue the discussion in the new MBA15 thread thats just a few topics below this one.

 

[FluJunkie]

A Mobile GPU is that much of a crippling experience? please when it comes to crappiness for all the faults of Apple's hardware lineup lets not try to delude ourselves that throwing more hardware at Adobe's crappy software is going to fix the problems you face - maybe your demand should be software that is properly optimised for Mac OS X instead of them demanding you plonk down several thousand on even higher end hardware just to get some decent performance out of their software.

Yes, and it has nothing to do with Adobe in my case.

The question is whether there is sufficient volume for Apple to even care in the long run - for every 'pro' such as yourself screaming about the demise of the Mac Pro there are 'Pro's' out there using MacBook Pro's and iMac's to get their work done. Either they're doing something really wrong or you need to evaluate what you're doing.

What this always ignores is the "Pros" using both. I have a Mac Pro, and a Macbook Pro. And some other devices. All help together with other Apple products. Why? Because they play well together.

But if you lose me on the Pro, you'll likely lose me on the rest as well.

True, but the question is, like I've said - is it worth their while for Apple to continue doing it? Pro's are now using MacBook Pro to do their work and no one is bleeding out their eyes because of the horrible experience. When your total Mac Pro shipments per-quarter is sitting at maybe slightly over 100,000 does it really make sense dedicating that much time and effort to it?

I am. I was using a MBP as my primary machine, switched to a Mac Pro, and will not be switching back to a laptop as my primary workstation. And if those 100,000 machines are heavily involved in the media and content creation fueling Apple's ecosystem? Hell yes it makes sense dedicating that much time and effort to it. Especially since the "time and effort" isn't actually all that steep - the Mac Pro isn't actually a machine that requires heavy design work.

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Back on topic, I'd be seriously tempted by a 15 inch ultrathin. My purchasing desires keep bouncing between a 15 inch MBP, a 13 inch MBP and the 13 inch Air.

I'd like a discrete graphics card.

I need expandable RAM. 4 GB max is a joke.