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Comment by rayhano | Hacker News Reader

Any ideas on when we are going to get MacBook Pros that are Air-like skinny and have incredible battery life?

Well, you could buy a MacBook Air. Actually, I'd like to see an external GPU over Thunderbolt possibly built into the next line of cinema displays, which would remove the need for the GPU in the Pro line.

> which would remove the need for the GPU in the Pro line.

No it would not.

I think by "GPU", it's presumed to mean "non-embedded GPU" as Intel has taken to bundling it with their newer i series chips.

Naturally, it's in that context that I made my reply. I don't see how a laptop without any way to output data would even be considered.

Is the Thunderbolt bandwidth sufficient to run a modern GPU? AFAIK you'd only have one 10 gbit/s lane to use for it, and modern PCIe video cards use a lot more than that connecting directly to mainboards over multiple PCIe lanes...

Light Peak seems to have been sufficient for the Vaio Z.

> and modern PCIe video cards use a lot more than that connecting directly to mainboards over multiple PCIe lanes...

Forgive my lack of a source, but was there not an article (maybe on Anandtech?) about high-end cards being 90%+ as performant on a 4x PCI-e slot?

Yes. Thunderbolt bandwidth falls between a PCI-E 2.0 1x slot and 4x slot.

Tests that have been done comparing the performance of relatively high end desktop cards on 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x slots have established that while there is a performance penalty, such a solution would still out perform most mobile GPUs.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_S...

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_480_PCI-Expres...

They're already pretty thin, my MBP is thinner then I think all laptops I see every day, save for ultraportables. And it (theoretically, since update to Lion and/or the way I work now brought it down to ~3 hours) already has the same (13" MBA) or better (11") battery life.

But are you asking about having so much computing power in MBA-like slim body? Then answer is - not for some time. Intel has Haswell [1] prepared for 2013 - that's the soonest I would expect things to change. There is also second possibility - with rumors of Apple going ARM-only - but even if (and that's pretty big if), we would see Macs with ARM around the time of Haswell introduction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)

> But are you asking about having so much computing power in MBA-like slim body? Then answer is - not for some time.

I don't know, removing the SuperDrive (whether they leave a second HDD/SSD rack or not) would make for a lot of room in MBPs, I'd say the drive takes more than 25% of the machine's internal volume, maybe up to 30%.

Having an Air-like "bar" SSD with an HDD/SSD rack on top (empty on base machines for instance) and removing the Superdrive would likely pay for most of the slimming towards a wedge MBP shape.

> There is also second possibility - with rumors of Apple going ARM-only - but even if (and that's pretty big if), we would see Macs with ARM around the time of Haswell introduction.

That may happen for the Air, I don't see it happening for MBP.

The main differentiating factor between the Air and the Pro is two cores versus four.

Is your question "when will we have a four-core MacBook Air with the same battery life as the current two-core version"?

My two-core 2011 MBP tends to disagree.

i5 in MBA is still nowhere near power of i5 in my 13" MBP.

Why would you not just buy the Air at that point?

Because some people don't want 15" screen, but still need more power than Air gives you.

If I were buying new computer now, it would be Air, but when I was buying my MacBook Pro, Airs were still using C2D - and since I'm using my computers for years - it wasn't really an option.

And price, weight, ports, and thickness, among many other features. Of all the factors, I don't think 2 vs. 4 cores is the "main" factor.

How do you expect a high-performance laptop with high-spec parts to get incredible battery life? (Besides simply waiting for power management to continue to improve)

It wouldn't make sense to ditch the high-spec parts, either- that's what the MacBook Pro is for. If you don't need the top-end bits, get an Air.

I pray for it on the next tick cycle, but I can't say about how Apple would feel about merging their different products into essentially 1 line.

I do wish for a 15" High-res Air though.

Apple taking logical steps to streamline and simplify their product line? Did you forget about the MacBook or the Powermac Cube or the CDMA iPhone already?

Extending the MBA line was the first move. It will take at least 2 more overhauls (not CPU upgrades) for the product lines to merge completely.

Intel delayed their next mobile processor revision until March 2012. So I wouldn't expect a new MBP until the Spring.

The rumors say next year but they are just rumors.

I heard a rumor about a rumor coming out next year.

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