Friday, May 07, 2010

Will the Next 13" MacBook Pro have an Optical Drive?

I've been following the news about the new MacBook 13" still having a Core 2 Duo when its bigger brothers have i5 and i7s. Apparently this was because there was not room to fit the added NVidia chipset needed to allow GPU switching. If this chipset problem persists, I'm going to bet that Apple removes the optical drive from the 13" MacBook Pro, giving room for the chipset and a bigger battery, and further I'll speculate that they begin selling a little NAS computer that includes: a shareable optical drive, a centralized iTunes server, a Time Machine server, and AppleTV functionality. This mashup of 4 separate products: Time Capsule, AppleTV, MacBook Air optical drive, and the iTunes library functionality makes a lot of sense, and would be billed as an energy efficient and environmentally friendly way to reduce redundancy. And somehow, this will tie into their cloud strategy which will be coming online shortly. And it would probably have enough GPU powered oomph for on the fly re-compression of video for use on iPhones and iPads.