R.I.P: Apple Axes the Plastic MacBook

In the midst of the much-anticipated release of Mac OS X Lion this morning, Apple has also made some changes to their hardware side of the Mac. Changes such as removing the optical drive on the Mac Mini, some spec improvements to both the 11-inch MacBook Air as well as the 13-inch MacBook Air, and they added a Thunderbolt port onto their Cinema Displays. What Apple didn’t advertise was the removal of the plastic MacBooks off their website.

Apple confirmed the removal with Engadget, and the polycarbonate laptop has officially been discontinued. The cheapest Mac laptop you can get is the 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.6GHz Core i5 CPU with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The 11-ich Air sure is sexy, but the small screen and limited power could be a problem for some users.  The polycarbonate MacBooks had similar specs to the base 13-inch MacBook Pros, which were a good bit more powerful than the base 11-inch Airs, which is why I’m still not too sure why Apple has pulled the plug on the plastic MacBooks, especially since they were once the top-selling Mac.

However, it should be noted that since Apple came out with the 13-inch MacBook Pro, its polycarbonate brother did see a decrease in sales.  So maybe Apple is just moving away from plastic products, as virtually all their products are made of Aluminium and glass. Whatever the case may be, we would like to bid the MacBook farewell and may it rest in peace.