Like the idea BUT they’d better not sacrifice power for longer battery life and lower weight.

The current ones are big, and I wouldn’t miss the optical drive, but they also have both an Intel HD Graphics 3000 card and an AMD Radeon HD 6750M/6770M with 512Mb/1Gb VRAM respectively. Quad core i7 processors. Up to 750Gb HDD. These things pack serious power.

What I’d like to see is a really solid video card with 1Gb dedicated VRAM. A smallish (say 128Gb) SSD for booting AND space for a second big HDD for data. Sure, a Thunderbird port but also USB, an SD card reader, headphone and mic plugs, and a separate video port. For a chip let’s say quad core Ivy Bridge starting at 2.5Ghz with 8GB RAM expandable.

And make it at the same price point as the current model.

For some reason I’m a little reluctant to part with the DVD drive.  I use mine occasionally, like to pop in a movie when I’m on vacation.  But I imagine that when I see them, if they’re as alluring as the MBAs, then I’ll probably still want one.

Like the idea BUT they’d better not sacrifice power for longer battery life and lower weight.

Important point, geoduck.

I have 17” MBP with a quad core i7 processor, 8 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD. It’s a serious machine that allows me to do high end data analysis with Stata multicore at speed. I would hate to see that go. If anything, I want more RAM, but not less power.

That said, having bought my wife a 13” MBA this past December (just in time for a US tax deduction), I admit to air-envy. I would love to have comparable performance specs to those of my current machine in the form factor of an Air. Increasingly, I see colleagues at conferences with Airs where last year they had Pros. The reason is simple - portability.

My feeling is that Apple would only be making such a move, if true, if they had figured out how to alter the form factor without substantially sacrificing performance, otherwise we might have seen this sooner. The field is too competitive, and their computer marketshare too low, to have nothing but a fleet of anaemic under-performing machines as their pro line. They would be gifting their competition a major tactical advantage otherwise.

IF Apple does away with optical drives in the MBP line, I will go Hackintosh for my next Mac portable.  I use optical disks for all kinds of purposes, from watching movies to archiving business and household finance data. Flash drives or SD cards don’t cut it for back-up or archiving, as far as I am concerned. I’ve had too many flash drives and SD card failures to consider them reliable. Compared to other types of storage, including flash memory, data on an optical disk is far less likely to degrade or become corrupt over time, with additional measure of being immune to electrical fields.  And to me, portable means not needing to attach another device (ie: external optical) to my laptop to get the performance I desire.

There is a 1.5 pound difference between the 13” MBA and the 13” MBP, and a 1/4’ difference in height. For the convenience of a B/I optical drive, and the added power of the MBP line, I do not think that extra 1.5 pounds is that big a deal.  Besides, the vast majority of us are rather lacking in the area of exercise as it is. I remember when it was not that big a deal to haul around a PowerBook G3. Are we becoming TOO spoiled?