If Three Guys and a Podcast‘s report holds true, the next iteration of the MacBook Pro will release in April 2011, featuring solid-state drives, and will dispense with optical drives, like the recent version of the MacBook Air. It is also speculated that the new MacBooks may feature Intel’s Light Peak optical cabling, which is supposed to be a universal bus to replace various buses, such as SATA, USB, HDMI, PCI Express and FireWire.
With the recent MacBook Air replacing standard storage with an SSD and continuing to be without an optical drive, along with Apple’s ever-growing digital download stores, namely the iTunes Store and Apple’s App Stores, it does seem like these rumors could be true, whether or not they’d be desired by the majority of the public.
Apple might be taking a gamble on removing the optical drive from their laptops, as many people still own CDs and DVDs, while the more hardcore computer user probably has a decent amount of disc-based software on a shelf somewhere and would be fairly unhappy if it became obsolete.
(Three Guys and a Podcast via The Unofficial Apple Weblog via DVICE)
