A few interesting details about Apple’s laptop offerings surfaced today, including the phasing out of the older white polycarbonate MacBook and upcoming changes to the MacBook Pro.
Industry insiders believe Apple plans to completely redesign the MacBook Pro line by the end of 2012, making the high-end laptops similar to the MacBook Airs, at least in appearance. Other features potentially coming to the new MBP’s include extended battery life and instant-on capability. It’s also rumored that the new machines will not include optical drives and will only be offered with SSD hard drives.
This would constitute a major change to the MacBook Pro, but it is not an unreasonable assumption. Apple has always touted the MacBook Air as a premium product, and it stands to reason that they would bring the two lines closer together as technology permits. The loss of an integrated optical disk drive would bother a portion of Apple’s customer base, but the company will certainly offer an external drive, much as they do with the Mac Mini currently.
In other news, the white MacBook, Apple’s last remaining laptop not built with a unibody aluminum case, was officially retired today. The machine has only been available to educational institutions since July 2011, and Apple’s replacement is an education-only 13” MacBook Air with similar specifications to the consumer 11” Air. At $999, the new Air is slightly more expensive than the MacBook it replaces, but has better specs than the older product. Apple is also offering bulk packages of the computers to educational institutions.
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Apple USB Ethernet Adapter
The Apple USB Ethernet Adapter is a simple, one-piece external adapter that plugs into the USB 2.0 port of your MacBook Air to provide 10/100BASE-T performance. Simply plug your Ethernet cable into the RJ-45 connector–no external power is required. It’s small, light, easy to install, and even easier to use.