In replacing the Mini DisplayPort in the latest revision of the venerable MacBook Pro line, you can bet that Apple’s going to start rolling out Thunderbolt to all Macs with each new iteration of the line-up… starting, it seems, with the venerable white unibody MacBook.
The above image purporting to be a leaked shot of the new entry-level MacBook’s array of ports shows the familiar Thunderbolt port. It’s worth noting this could easily be PhotoShopped if need be: since the Mini DisplayPort and ThunderBolt port both share the same shape and even position between MacBook Pro revisions. All it would take is taking the existing image of the MacBook’s profile found on the official Apple site and replacing the Mini DisplayPort text and icon with Thunderbolt’s. Even the text about “Ports with possibilities” is the same as on Apple’s existing MacBook page.
That said, Apple’s making a big deal about Thunderbolt, and since they’ve rolled the functionality of Mini DisplayPort into Thunderbolt, it makes sense that Apple would want to homogenize the functionality of all the Mini DisplayPorts across the next-gen Mac line-up.
My guess is that even if this is a PhotoShop, we’ll still see Thunderbolt in the plastic unibody MacBook next revision… if Apple bothers to keep it around at all now that we have the $999 MacBook Air, that is.
