It is believed by sources affiliated with www.macrumors.com that a new Macbook will be released sometime in 2008. Apple has apparently created a notebook that will have increased startup speed and will be significantly lighter and thinner, though otherwise similar in size to its current 15″ Macbook. This innovation raises a question for me. When will this phenomenon stop, or will it? It seems like notebooks are consistently getting thinner and lighter, but at some point there will be no thinner they can go. Laptops can only get so thin before they are either too fragile to use regularly or are too thin for their components.This makes me wonder if items like the new iPhone are going to forever change the landscape of this market. I wonder if laptops in the form they are in now will be non-existent in 20 years, or if they will decide to keep them a similar size, but instead try to upgrade all of their components. For example, at five pounds the weight of a 15″ MacBook Pro is entirely workable. Instead of trying to make it any lighter, wouldn’t it make more sense to instead work to upgrade processor speed, battery life and screen resolution? I personally would not want a computer that is any smaller, but I would welcome one with a 20 hour battery life and a processor speed that loads all applications in a snap. I think that this topic goes along well with what we talked about earlier in the semester regarding companies constantly trying to one-up one another rather than to sit back and think about how what we already have could be made more efficient. If the focus is always on smaller and lighter, when will we ever have the time to devote to gaining substantial jumps in performance and programming? Could the following ad be true?