Million MacBook Airs Shipped In Fewer Than Three Months — Major MacBook Pro Redesign Later This Year?

Appleinsider’s Kasper Jade, citing Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, reports that the streamlined and lightweight family of MacBook Airs introduced by Apple last October were an instant hit with consumers, with Apple shipping 1.1 million 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs during the part of the three-month period ending December during which they were avbailable, making these new notebook models one of Apple’s most successful Mac product launches ever.

The spectacular sales debut of the redesigned MacBook Air underscores that Steve Jobs again called it when he described the new Air as the future of notebook computing at the product announcement last October. Many people anticipated that Apple would follow the revised Air with a redesign of the unibody MacBook Pro incorporating the new Air’s slim, wedge-shaped form factor, dropping the internal optical drive, and making SSD storage standard equipment. None of that happened with the February 24 release of a substantially refreshed MacBook Pro family, but there is no way Apple could have anticipated that the new Air would catch on with consumers the way it has in time to redesign the Pro line for a late winter release that was pretty much obligatory in order to bring them up to date with Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU silicon that several Windows PC competitiors had been offering for a couple of months, and that change along with adding the Thunderbolt high-speed I/O interface was plenty enough for development engineers to address in the short term.

However, I think its a plausible guess that this latest iteration of the MacBook Pros may well be the last in their late 2008 form factors, and the next major MacBook Pro redesign is almost certain to incorporate styling cues borrowed from the MacBook Pro. The question is whether that will come as early as October, which would be the third anniversary of the 13” and 15” aluminum unibody, or will they hold off until a year or more from now.

Whichever, I suspect that the internal optical drive is on the bubble, but I still will be surprised if Apple goes with SSD storage across the board in its Pro ‘Books unless there is an unexpected major breakthrough in the SSD cost/capacity equation between now and then.