In Search for Next Generation MacBook Pro 18

Apple's WWDC 2007 is closed. However, have you ever think about the agenda of Macworld Expo January 2009? I think the recent Acer Blue announcement and news of Economic Daily both have the lead. It's the Next Generation of MacBook Pro 18.

I believe the next generation of Macbook Pro has 18.4 inch display with Full HD and LED top-view back-light with metal cover.

Full-HD , a must have

Let's look at Acer's Blue first. The specification is listed below.

Acer Aspire 8920G
• Intel® Centrino® processor technology
• up to 4GB DDR2 RAM, HDD up to 320GB
• High-brightness 18.4” Full HD (1920 x 1080) display with 16:9 aspect ratio
• Powerful NVIDIA® GeForce® 9650M GS or 9500M GS dedicated graphic chipset
• Integrated Super-Multi drive (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RAM) , 6-in-1 card reader
• Dolby Home Theater® audio with five built-in speakers and one Acer Tuba CineBass sub-woofer
• Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam with complete wired and wireless connectivity including Bluetooth® technology

The specification of MacBook Pro 17 is listed below courtesy of Apple. The key feature is mark board.

Display:
• 17-inch (diagonal) antiglare widescreen TFT display supported resolution:1680 by 1050

Graphics:
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support and 512MB of GDDR3 memory

Processor and memory:
•2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed
•2GB (two 1GB SO-DIMMs) of PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2 memory

Storage:
•250GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive;
•8x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

You can see the specification of MacBook Pro 17 is far behind the Acer Blue, since the technology lags 18 months. To have the best MacBook in the product line, I think MacBook Pro 17 will evolve to 18 inch display with Full-HD and Blu-ray Dics . This is not the only one technology innovation, but another one will follow.

Green back-light

In January 2007, Steve said the future Apple will be more greener. The market speculated the CCFL that contains mercury will be phased out among Apple's product. However, the CCFL is still the light source of Apple Cinema view and MacBook Pro 17. MacBook Pro 17 is the only NB that uses CCFL back-light solution. I think change must happen to complaint of Jobs' vision.

LED NB is nothing new. MacBook Pro 15 has already adopt this technology in 2007. However, the back-light in MacBook Pro 15 is side-view technology, that is the LEDs are installed on the down side of display panel. With the growth of NB panel size and demand of brightness of display, the brightness and contract ration of display are limited by one-side LED strip. The current state of art says the brighter is the LED, the more heat it emits. The more heat LED emits, the shorter life time it becomes. Researches show that the life time of LED may decline to half of assumed life time.

Hence, how can we have brighter display with LED? The proposed solutions are side-view of both sides of panel or top-view technology. However, the power and thickness nature in NB is limited the adopting of former one. To adopt the both side-view in NB, the thickness of panel will increase and light guide, which distributes the light evenly in back-light module, have to be redesigned. This increase both weight of NB and strength of cover of NB.

Top-view back-light of white LED for NB

On the other hand, the top-view LED back-light is common in slim TFT-LCD TV, such as,
SONY, SHARP, and Hitachi. The LEDs used in the back-light are composed of red, green and blue LEDs to have richer color more than 100% NTSC. The white LED is not used because the phosphor is not so efficient to transfer all the blue or ultraviolate light to full range of light and the color range is not outstanding as R-G-B solution. In addition, the heat emission is another problem. To shrink the top-view back-light from 40 inches to 18 inches, there must be good design to dispatch heat form LEDs to environment. Is metal cover the solution?

Nonetheless, the Chinese newspaper, Economic Daily, sited Biing-Jye Lee, the chairman of Epistar, which is the leading LED chips maker in Taiwan, said that some back-light company is sampling a kind of NB back-light with white LED and top-view technology.

Considering those weaknesses, I wonder who will order this product with such technology advance? Apple or DELL? My reasoning is Apple because of Job's vision and the high-end nature of MacBook pro.

The next generation of Macbook Pro 18 with Full-HD and top-view LED back-light in January 2009? Time will tell.