New MacBook Pro could arrive in April 2011 with SSD, Light Peak, no DVD

by Sam Abuelsamid (RSS feed) on Nov 29th 2010 at 8:45AM

Update Put your checkbooks away, folks. Electronista has all but debunked this rumor. By crunching the numbers, they confirmed that (at today's prices at least), such a MacBook Pro could easily be priced out of the market. Read on and dream, but don't expect this machine to appear on your desk any time soon.

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Three Guys and a Podcast are reporting that the next-generation MacBook Pro will likely arrive in April 2011 with a new design inspired by the latest slim-line MacBook Air. That means that the high-end laptops will probably dispense with spinning drives altogether and come equipped only with solid-state drives of up to 512GB capacity. If you haven't yet finished ripping all of your CDs and DVDs, you'll want to complete that task before migrating to a new MBP because the internal optical drive will probably follow the floppy into the annals of history.

With the internal speed bottlenecks reduced by the flash memory drives and new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Apple will also work on speeding up the external communication interfaces. Light Peak may finally debut on the MBP, two years after it was originally announced by Intel. Whether or not Light Peak makes it to the party, we expect that USB 3.0 probably will arrive in an Apple product on these new machines. The fate of Firewire is unknown at this time, but it seems unlikely to make the cut, especially if Light Peak is included. The one exception may be if Apple keeps one of the current generation 15-inch machines in the lineup as an entry model. If the 13-inch MBP also remains in the lineup, the new interfaces, CPUs and perhaps a higher resolution display will be what set it apart from the similarly sized Air.

Users are expected to be able to put this speedy new hardware to work with a new version of Final Cut Pro that should debut around the same time. Not much is known about FCP at this time except that it should be faster.

via tuaw.com

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