Rumour: Plastic MacBooks Aren’t Dying, Just Waiting For A Makeover

I’ve sort of been assuming for a while that Apple was close to giving up on the aging polycarbonate MacBook, but apparently not: AppleInsider’s got a source saying that, pending a “industrial design overhaul,” it’s here to stay.

Lately, the plastic MacBook has felt like an unwanted orphan. It’s a tired three-year-old design that looks stodgy next to the slick new unibodies, but without it, Apple’s cheapest laptop would cost $US1200—a little too high for a lot of prospective Mac users, and a lot too high for Microsoft-paid Laptop Hunters.

Apple needs something at or below the $US1000 price point, but it’d help it it wasn’t a product that was designed in 2005. So, this:

[The MacBook's] industrial design overhaul… will see them reemerge in the coming months with a slimmer, lighter enclosure and restructured internal architecture to boot.

This makes plenty of strategic sense, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turned out to be true. So, what would it look like? This description doesn’t really narrow things down, so it could just as easily be a child of the unibodies, design-wise, as of the old polycarb, or something new entirely. [AppleInsider]