Apple may be getting ready to release a new iPad and several new MacBook Pro models. One indication is that Apple has reportedly asked its store employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement ahead of an employee meeting scheduled Sunday. If an employee declined to sign, the meeting was off-limits.
A major update of its MacBook Pro notebooks, with as many as five new models, is suspected by a variety of Apple watchers. However, some believe the notebooks will be launched on Thursday — which is Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs’ 56th birthday. However, Apple has not announced a Thursday event that would be before the meeting for retail employees.
Light Peak
The new MacBook Pros, according to some observers, will feature Intel’s new dual-core Sandy Bridge mobile chips and might contain a solid-state drive used only for a quick-start OS. They may also have a new data port called Light Peak, with a blazing 10-gigabits-per-second transfer rate. This would be the fastest transfer rate from a Mac to another Mac, or a Mac to a storage device.
Light Peak technology has been promoted by Intel and Apple as a replacement for FireWire 800, USB 3.0, and other connection technologies. It utilizes daisy-chaining, allowing one device to be connected to another, and it’s expected to be available in a fiber-optic version as well as a copper one.
The version expected to be announced soon by Apple will be copper, but the optical version is the real powerhouse. Optical is expected to offer 100 gigabits per second in addition to carrying an electrical connection for powering peripherals.
Robert X. Cringely, an independent observer of the computer scene, is predicting that Light Peak technology, coupled with automatic load distribution in Mac OS X from Grand Central Dispatch and multi-processing control from Mac OS X’s Xgrid, could…