Apple tends to like coherency.
In the industrial of their products. In their design language. From fonts, to colour schemes, to materials, to user experience.
Consistency.
A random thought came about recently, regarding the shape and design of the upcoming retina MacBook Air 12".
What form will the baseline of laptops take?1 I believe I've found the answer.
It will essentially look like two iPads glued together with a hinge. Thus the materials (shades of grey, gold and silver in the aluminium construction of the iPad) and technique for forging this will be brought back to the Mac. Or, perhaps, the materials will be broadly similar to the Mac Pro's (smooth, dark grey finish), with a number of colours available.
Will it have a physical keyboard? I hope so. ARM processor? I hope not?2.
Either way, it's going to be a major gamechanger again. Thin. Portable. Light. Yet, powerful. A compelling purchase for many. The beacon for the future of the next generation of Apple portable harware.
1. Steve Jobs, when referring to the redesigned, second-generation MacBook Air, mentioned how it was the future of the portable Mac line. It was true for the entire laptop industry as well: here was an increasing focus on battery life. Portability (both dimensions, and also weight). Materials (The second-generation MBA is wonderfully built, without any significant physical drawback. The full-sized keyboard remains, as is the very capable glass trackpad that was first introduced in the second-generation unibody MacBook Pro-series.).↩
2. Having an Intel CPU in a laptop (like the retina MacBook Air 12") is still ridiculously useful for the following reasons: 1) The ability to run Windows. 2) Better performance (which is good for playing games, or running intensive applications). 3) Backwards compatibility with the wealth of apps that are in the Mac App Store (technically Apple could mandate that all apps would have to be coded in Swift for the new ARM 'PC-class' CPU, but that would be a significant hassle.). 4) Apple is good at bringing industry-wide change, but there have been examples (such as the failure of Windows RT) where moving a laptop traditionally based off of a PC platform to ARM hasn't been such a good idea.↩