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Upcoming MacBook Pros to pack in SSDs and Light Peak?

Teaser
The new MacBook Pros will likely appear in April 2011 and might also come without any internal optical drive

It has not been long since Apple refreshed its MacBook range of notebooks with the latest of hardware. And now, not long after that, we hear rumors about Apple’s plans for the next-generation MacBooks coming up sometime in mid 2011.

If rumors are to be believed, Apple’s next refresh of MacBook Pros will take place in April 2011, and the refreshed MacBooks are supposed to come equipped with Solid State Drives (SSDs), replacing the usual HDDs, capacities of which will range up to 512GB. Also making the buzz is the first ever implementation of the Intel Light Peak optical cable technology. It is also a much rumored fact that Apple is actively involved in the Light Peak project with Intel, and so Apple might be the very first to get the technology to its products. For all those who don’t know, the Light Peak technology is set to bring in high transfer speeds between peripheral devices, based on high-speed optical cable technology, and will offer speeds starting from a whooping 10Gbps.

Not only this, the next refresh of the Apple MacBook Pros will also bring along a complete redesign of the product portfolio. And there’s going to be more, these MacBook Pros are likely to have no internal optical drives. Instead, the company will provide Apple-branded external optical drives, using Light Peak technology, to work with the notebooks. Why Apple would choose to this, if they do so, is still a mystery. There’s also speculation that Apple might still retain a current generation MacBook Pro for consumers who’d not be comfortable with the optical drive-less models. Sources also say that these new MacBook Pros will start at a price of $1,999 and it is expected that the new MacBook Pros will offer quieter and more power-efficient performance owing to almost no moving parts, also making it light in weight.

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Pallab Jyotee Hazarika, 2010-12- 1 (Update: 2012-05-26)