Bijan on MacWorld
What I want is a new, ultra-thin MacBook Pro. Not a stripped down MacBook. I want a kick-ass super thin MacBook Pro that includes:
- flash based hdd. 80 gigs or more
- 6+ hour battery life (need to make a cross country flight)
- Long WiFi range
- Built in EVDO modem (rev A)
- ability to drive an Apple 30” monitor
- ability to have 8 gigs of RAM
- 12 or 13” monitor
- express card slot
Well, they don’t make 80 GB SSDs, but you can see that the pricing would be prohibitive. 64 GB for $1,700 or 128 GB for $4,000.
You can’t get an ExpressCard slot, a 6-hour battery, and a discrete graphics chip (required to drive the 30”) in a super-thin laptop at any cost. There just isn’t enough room for the required parts — especially the battery.
8 GB of RAM is also a challenge, since the largest DDR2 SO-DIMMs on the market are only 2 GB, so you’d need to somehow fit 4 RAM slots in there. But that’s irrelevant, since Intel doesn’t currently make any mobile chipsets that can address more than Santa Rosa’s 4 GB limit.
But if you could somehow cram all of these required (and some imaginary) parts into a laptop with a 12-13” screen, it would be twice as thick as a MacBook and cost $4,000-6,500, depending on the SSD capacity.
Merry Christmas! (Sorry for crushing your dreams.)