MacBook Air Style Ultra-Thin 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros Coming? – You Can Bet On It

Appleinsider’s Katie Marsal reports that with Apple’s new family of MacBook Airs gaining considerable traction in the marketplace over the past nine months, the company is believed to be working on the design ultra-thin 15″ and 17″ MacBook notebook models the better to capitalize on the trend towards ultra-mobile computing, with the new notebook’s rumored to be in the late testing stages, according to a MacRumors report. Marsal says it’s unclear at this point whether these machines would be marketed as the next MacBook Pro as larger models of the MacBook Air, but suggests that Apple might choose to test the waters, as it were, by first introducing a 15-inch MacBook Air, and suggests that going cold turkey by abandoning traditional optical and hard disk drive equipped MacBook Pros could prove too much of a functionality sacrifice for those who use their laptops as serious computing platforms.

This all sounds plausible, and I do hope the ease of transition part is the way Apple will proceed. The current MacBook Pro line’s aluminum unibody design is now closing on its third anniversary, which is a relatively long time in the PC industry, although far from unprecedented for Apple, which stuck with the same basic professional laptop form factor from January/September (15″) 2003 to October 2008 in both PowerBook and MacBook Pro iterations, and the dual-USB iBook design from May 2001 to May 2006 — then essentially continued it with a modest facelift as the original polycarbonate MacBook in white and black versions until October, 2008 as well. Viewed from that historical perspective, the late 2008 unibody design is a relative spring’s chicken, and my hope would be that it will be continued for some time yet — the 13″ version in particular rivaling the 2000 PowerBook Pismo as my favorite Apple notebook model ever.

I like the MacBook Air, but personally I have misgivings about giving up on-board optical drives yet, and while I might be able to struggle along with just a 256 GB SSD, the latter are still prohibitively expensive, and 128 GB is just plain inadequate for this very tentative cloud computing user. I want my important data under my direct stewardship where I can get at it without the intermediary medium of the Internet.

That said, I’ll concede to the inevitability that the next-generation MacBook Pro is going to be strongly influenced design-wise by the MacBook Air, the operative question being how much of the traditional Pro model functionality and connectivity will survive the transition.

As for timing, the MacBook Air just got a substantial refresh, and the MacBook Pro’s were revamped in February (possibly the definitive traditional laptop iteration for users who prefer that and want OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard compatibility for legacy software and conventional user interface conventions), so I’m skeptical that we’ll see a Pro redesign before early 2012, although an add-on 15″ MacBook Air model could be a possibility before Christmas — still an unlikely prospect I think.