The past few days had seen a crazy mix of rumors about the exact new Macs that will be announced during the keynote tonight, and much of the rumors are about the big possibility that the new 15-inch Mac notebook will not be a MacBook Pro, but instead a new “MacBook”, and that the MacBook Pro line will live on a bit longer with only updates to the internals.
This mean that the Macs codenamed J30 and J31 in my previous post could instead be updated MacBook Pros as opposed to actually being new and redesigned iMacs.
Having absolutely no rumors/news about redesigned iMacs besides extremely vaguer mentions in the major rumor sites isn’t helping either. In the days leading up to WWDC 2012, we have heard a great deal about the new Mac Pros, the new 15-inch Mac notebook, and lesser about the updated MacBook Airs, but almost absolutely nothing about the iMacs, rather than some unverified news that redesigned iMacs will not make it in time for WWDC 2012.
However, something about the whole MacBook Pro line being retained despite having a new 15-inch Mac notebook stinks though.
Apple is not a company afraid to cut old products when they introduce new ones.
Apple is also not a company to keep complex product lines.
A 11/13 MacBook Air line, with a 13/15/17 MacBook Pro line, with a new 15 MacBook line, all for Apple’s notebook lineup, is absolutely nonsensical and not in Apple’s fashion to do.
What Apple will be in favor of, is a product lineup which they have implemented since day 1 of their big switch to intel more than 6 years ago.
6 years ago, there was a 13-inch MacBook, and a 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro.
Yes, this means that the notebooks are separated into two lines based on the size of the notebooks, which made sense since Apple could really only put in Pro-level graphics cards in the bigger Mac notebooks.
If you recall, Apple was all ready to follow that lineup when they introduced the unibody MacBooks (13-inch) and the unibody MacBook Pros (15-inch and 17-inch) in late 2008. But then they realized they had to have a Mac notebook under 1000USD, and thus the MacBook White was revived, and the 13-inch unibody MacBook became the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which in itself isn’t very “Pro”, being the only MacBook Pro without a dedicated graphics card (yes there was an oddball 15-inch without a dedicated card for a while, but nobody except Elsie Law wanted one).
If the Apple today is still the Apple of Steve Jobs, I believe we will be seeing this new MacBook line-up tonight;
11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air (with Retina Displays)
and
the all-new 15-inch MacBook Pro (redesigned, with Retina Display)
And then I’ll have my redesigned iMacs too. Yay~
