MacBook Pro Refresh This Week?

Rumors of an impending update to Apple’s MacBook Pro line gained further credence over the long weekend with an innocuous change in the Apple Store. The MacBook Pro had been shipping within 24 hours of purchase. No longer. Now the ship time is 3-5 business days.

Conceivably, the sudden delay could be related to unexpected supply constraints, but it’s not likely. Apple typically institutes such product-line-wide shipping delays when a refresh is imminent and that appears to be the case here. Certainly, all the other standard indicators are there: a MacBook Pro drought at Apple’s European distributors, placeholder SKUs for unknown Apple hardware mysteriously appearing retail partner inventory systems and a sudden abundance of spec rumors: in this case claims that the new iteration of the MacBook Pro will be cast from Liquid Metal, run Intel’s new Sandy Bridge architecture, feature a larger glass trackpad, a combination drive that will store the machine’s OS on SSD and data on HDD and support Intel’s high-speed connection technology Light Peak.

Tough to separate fact from fiction here. Apple should do that for us on Thursday, the presumed launch date–and CEO Steve Jobs’s birthday.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=692271649 Luis Eduardo Gutierrez

So, where is the magical golden ticket for the Apple event? Does Apple really send invitations two days before an event? I thought they usually gave it a week.
Anonymous

Generally with product refreshes they just happen. Look for the online Apple Store to go down late Wednesday night / early Thursday morning…
Anonymous

Pretty much updates that don’t warrant a call to reporters to visit the Bay Area.

When get a carbon fiber body for Macbook Pros, along with the death of the optical drive, that might require a big event.
Anonymous

The SSD rumor makes sense. The speedup in a MacBook Air is amazing, and they would only need a small SSD if they also put in a hard drive. The first time I saw Mac OS boot on an SSD it actually scared me. You can’t have a $999 MacBook Air with 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo be so much faster at so many things than a $2500 MacBook Pro with almost 3GHz i7.

Adding more cables to MagSafe (or adding one multi-protocol cable like LightPeak) also fits with their established trends.

I am skeptical of Liquid Metal MacBooks. I think Liquid Metal is about smaller parts like iPads, iPhones, and iPods. The recent MacBook Air has a top cut from a single piece of aluminum as well as the bottom that has always been done that way. I don’t see them changing that yet.
Anonymous

Carbon fiber? Ugh. Do not want.

MacBook Pro Refresh This Week?

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