Apple has delayed shipping MacBook Pros on its online store for 3-5 business days… delaying the earliest day you can have a MacBook Pro shipped to you to well-ahead of the rumored Thursday launch of the next-gen MacBook Pros. Given how religious Apple’s Tim Cook is about supply, this has all the markings of an official MacBook Pro refresh.
Specs-wise, only Apple can say for sure what has changed in the MacBook Pros since the last refresh, but the last major redesign was the leap to unibodies back in 2009, so we’re due for something more major than a chip bump.
Rumors for the next MacBook Pro include the near certainty of a leap to the Sandy Bridge architecture, a LiquidMetal chassis, user-swappable hard/optical drive enclosures, a higher-density display, ubiquitous SSDs and a slimmer form factor.
Overall, expect the new MacBook Pros to be more MacBook Air like than their predecessors, as Tim Cook has already made it obvious that he sees the Air as the “future of the MacBook,” not the slim-form factor exception.
Update: In the original version of this post, we said that MacBook Pros had stopped shipping. This was an error which we’ve since clarified. We apologize for the mistake.
