The New Macbook

Posted by testcss on April 17, 2012 08:58 pm 15

The New MacBooks

Everyone knows that new MacBooks powered by Ivy Bridge and the latest 28nm graphic cards from either AMD or Nvidia are coming. I have created a mock-up to show a new style of MacBooks that I think Apple will likely release.

I chose a nostalgic "blackbook" look that is thin and modern. The screen has a smaller bezel and the body is curved more. This particular mock-up shows the 15" model and is .75" thick fitting into the Ultrabook category. The body is a liquid metal black unibody that is lighter and stronger than aluminum.

Some specs for the upcoming notebook may look like the following, you can read the explanation at the bottom for why I chose these specs:

$1799:

15" MacBook

2880 x 1800 IPS pixel-doubled (quadrupled total) display

i7 3620M 4 cores @ 2.3 GHz

4GB RAM @ 1600MHz

240 GB solid state drive

HD 4000 graphics + Nvidia 640M with 1GB VRAM

8 Hr Battery

$2199

15" MacBook

2880 x 1800 IPS pixel-doubled display

i7 3720M 4 cores @ 2.6 GHZ

4GB RAM @ 1600MHz

480 GB solid state drive

HD 4000 graphics + Nvidia 640M with 1GB VRAM

8 Hr Battery

$2499

17" MacBook

3200 x 2000 IPS (This is 1600 x1000 "doubled" , max size wallpapers in Lion are 3200 x 2000 showing that it is a resolution Apple is planning on using)

i7 3720M 4 cores @ 2.6 GHZ

4GB RAM @ 1600MHz

480 GB solid state drive

HD 4000 graphics + Nvidia 650M with 1GB VRAM

10 Hr Battery

On all MacBooks, I believe the ODD drive, Ethernet, and Firewire ports are removed. I think 2 Thunderbolt ports and three USB3 ports is all that will be provided. The extra space will be used to allow for bigger batteries and cooling systems that allow for long battery lives even with dedicated graphics and retina displays. Apple will be first to standardize on SSDs, but I can see them allowing build to order options with a hard drive filling the ODD space for people who need more storage. The processors and graphics all can fit in a .75" space and meet the power limit. Apple will still stick to an anemic 4GB of RAM I think, so that is what I included.

Now for the big discussion: Retina Displays. I had initially thought this wouldn't come so quickly, but after seeing how easily they got a 2048 x 1536 display into an iPad, I think it is possible. All the HIDPI work Apple has been doing lately points to such a screen and it will be a logical step forward. The move from 1440 x 900 to 2880 x 1800 is pretty logical, but I was stumped at what to do with the 17" model. The HD graphics only support 3840 x 2160 so a pure pixel doubled 17" wouldn't work on integrated graphics and using dedicated graphics to power the display would be too big of a hit on battery. Also, this far surpasses Retina for that size display. The aha moment was seeing that many graphics files In Lion were at max 3200 x 2000. This would make the UI look like a 1600 x 1000 screen which is close to the common 1680 x 1050, but it would look about twice as crisp. I believe that losing some working area on the 17" is worth it for a retina display.

Some people may think that this is all to expensive, but I calculated the prices and it wasn't too expensive. For the base 15", the processor is about $320, motherboard is $100, graphics and cooling were about $250, RAM is 20$, SSD is about $300, display would be about $200 based off the cost of the iPad's screen, and the engineering of the liquid metal body would be another $100 once the price is divided into millions of MacBooks. Add $300 dollars for everything else such as batteries, connectors, etc. and it is at reasonable price of $1590 give or take $100. Apple's manufacturing margins overtime would allow even greater prices and may end at the $1300-1400 area for around $400 of profit. I am looking at the highest prices to make a conservative estimate too. Sacrifices may be made to reach higher margins though, such as smaller SSDs. The margins only go up on there higher end machines.

What do you think about my mock-up and ideas? Also anyone know of any image hosting site that works well with posting links into posts such as these? Box works less than ideally to show my mock-up.