Apple is getting ready to debut five upgraded versions of its MacBook Pro notebook line, according to reports.
Speculation continues to grow that computer maker Apple is readying a
refresh of its line of MacBook Pro notebooks. The Mac blog AppleInsider reported the company issued
strict warnings to its retail partners not to open any sealed containers that
arrive to their stores, which some say suggest the updated notebooks are contained
inside.
"According to those same people briefed on this week's shipments,
Apple's major European distributors ran out MacBook Pros near the top of the
month, regional resellers have not been able to place new orders for the
notebooks for over two weeks, and Apple has not shipped a single unit of its
own to the channel during the same period of time," AppleInsider reported
on Sunday.
The possibility of an impending wave of new MacBooks was also heightened
after technology blog Engadget reported major big box
retailer Best Buy had released five stock keeping unit (SKU) tags with an
availability listed as "Coming Soon." The five SKUs and corresponding
price points (the notebooks will be priced at $1,199, $1,499, $1,799, $2,199
and $2,499) lend credence to earlier rumors that Apple will debut five price
points instead of the current six.
In addition to the MacBook price point rumors, speculation is also building
that Apple will be using Intel's Light
Peak technology on the updated
notebooks. Light Peak
is a high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices
to each other. Light Peak
high bandwidth starts at 10G bps. The technology also has the ability to run
multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology
to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations
and others.
Light Peak
consists of a controller chip and an optical module that will be included in
platforms supporting this technology. The optical module performs the
conversion from electricity to light and vice versa, using miniature lasers and
photo detectors. Light Peak
also includes a controller chip that Intel will provide. The controller chip
provides protocol switching capabilities to support multiple protocols over a
single cable.
Today, if you want to plug a display into a PC, you'd need a display cable plugged
into a display connector. Likewise, if one was to plug a projector into a PC, a
different projector cable and connector would be needed. Not so with Light
Peak, because the Light
Peak controller implements multiprotocol.
Apple is also rumored to be developing a smaller, cheaper version of its
popular iPhone smartphone that would target less high-end consumers and allow
the company to better compete with low-cost alternatives provided on the Google
Android platform. However, Apple told The New York Times that a smaller iPhone
was not being developed, disputing a claim made by The Wall Street Journal,
which quoted a source in an earlier article describing the new iPhone to be
about half the size of the iPhone 4.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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