It seems that all the rumors this year regarding the release of MacBooks equipped with Retina Displays could come true in the near future, according to those from 9to5mac. The design of the new Macs will not be a copy of that of the MacBook Airs, but it will borrow certain elements from it, but essentially we are talking about new MacBook Pros that will be much thinner. It seems that only the 15-inch models will be reworked and the optical drives will be removed from them to allow the case to be thinner, and the on/off button will be mounted directly into the keyboard. Apart from the slimming of the design and the modification of the part that incorporates the keyboard, the new MacBook Pros will look exactly the same as the ones available now.
Instead, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is described as being an ultra-thin version of the current MacBook Pro. Basically, the prototype design is a thinner, yet more robust, version of the late-2008 design. It has no tapering like the MacBook Airs. As the MacBook Air pioneered, and the latest Mac mini models have followed, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro loses the optical drive in order to reach Apple's new standard for notebook thinness. While the new MacBook Pro does not take all of the external design cues from the current MacBook Air, it does adopt the tweaked MacBook Air keyboard design with the power button on the keyboard itself (which replaces the disc eject key). The rest of the design is basically what we are all familiar with: charging and connection ports along the sides, and a spacious glass Multi-Touch trackpad (either same or similar in size to the current MacBook Pro and MacBook Air trackpads based on the cutout present in the prototype unibodies).
The new Retina Display will bring a change similar to the one we saw when this kind of screens were implemented in the iPhone 4 and iPad 3. Basically, Apple will most likely double the resolution of Mac screens and give up the idea of changing the resolution as we know it now, but it will allow us to adjust the quality of the images on the screen using a new system. The Macs will allow us to choose the resolutions: large, small, optimal, etc., the company's engineers programming each option separately to display the images as clearly as possible on the new screens. In essence, Apple will modify the classic resolution selection system and introduce a completely new one, but it remains to be seen how everything will be thought out. The screens will definitely be the ones that will attract everyone's attention and if you appreciate the Retina Display in the iPad and iPhone, then you will love the one in the Macs.
The display is quoted as "jaw-dropping" and "definitely the most important Mac innovation in years," by sources familiar with the quality of the screens in test-production. With that in mind, imagine the sharpness of text and the beauty of images on a 15-inch professional Retina Display-packing notebook. Sources familiar with software strings left behind in OS X Lion 10.7.4 and Mountain Lion betas say that this Retina Display MacBook Pro features multiple Retina resolution modes, so users are able to adjust the sharpness and image sizes to their liking. Unlike Mac display settings of today, these Retina Display settings will not be marked with numbers/resolution sizes, but with descriptions such as big, small, or optimal, according to these software-based findings.
In the end, we learn that USB 3.0 will finally arrive in Apple's Macs, and we are talking here about higher USB transfer speeds and more energy-efficient components. USB 3.0 theoretically achieves transfer speeds of up to 80 MBs between a computer and a compatible peripheral, but everything depends on the components. In addition to those mentioned above, we have processors from the Ivy Bridge series and Nvidia GT650M graphics cards, so better performance and again a much more efficient energy consumption.
Of course, for now all this is just speculation, but in the summer we should have the Macs available in the online store of the Apple company, and everything would be able to be purchased at the same prices as before.
