One piece aluminium next-gen Macbooks to get glass trackpads and alternative chipsets

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 05:02

Your IT - Home IT

The Mac world is rife with rumour over just what shape the next generation laptops, so we've rounded them up and shot the obvious vapourware contenders to leave just a bunch of pretty feasible options. Inside and out, it seems, Apple is planning some pretty radical changes to the Macbook...

We have already reported on the rumours surrounding the possibilities of a Macbook Touch, or Newton V2 if you prefer, so I won't bothering going over that ground again. However, there has plenty to keep the Apple aficionado on the edge of their seats regarding developments of the next generation of Macbook laptops in general.

Not least the claims by AppleInsider that Apple is planning to chuck out the Intel Montevina chipset for the next-gen hardware and instead go back to custom designed 'own brand' chipsets. There has even been talk of turning to AMD or possibly NVidia produced chipsets.

Naturally, this has spawned something of a cottage industry specialising in producing 'Intel Outside Apple' headlines for fanboy bloggers and quick off the mark media reporters alike. A great headline, bit not one that I chose to run with as it is not actually correct.

AppleInsider does, indeed, claim that the new Macbooks could "sport some of the most significant architectural changes since the Mac maker made the jump from PowerPC processors to those manufactured by Intel Corp" and it does say that people familiar with Apple's plans admit they "won't adopt the Montevina chipset announced as part of Intel's Centrino 2 mobile platform earlier this month."

What it does not say is that Apple is abandoning Intel altogether. The primary CPU will continue to be an Intel Inside experience. All that is likely to be changed are the chipsets which connect the processor to the computer, the support chips if you will.

So will we see a retro concept as far as chipsets are concerned in next-gen Macbooks? And what about those glass trackpads? Read on for more...

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