Apple is on the cusp of offering up a 3G Macbook if a newly acquired patent is anything to go by. That’s probably not massive news to PC owners who’ve been packing built-in 3G in their laptops for yonks but for Mac-toting road warriors it could be godsend…
The 3G Macbook patent uncovered by Patently Apple was part of a batch of 17 granted to Apple in the US. The batch included documents related to the new iPod touch and iMac. The 3G Macbook patent goes into exhaustive detail about how Apple could incorporate a “multi-band cellular telephone antenna and…multi-band wireless local area network antenna” in the same laptop.
While we’ve seen recent Macbook and Macbook Pro refreshes, the Macbook Air has remained conspicuously untouched. It doesn’t seem like a huge jump to predict that Apple will first put this 3G Macbook patent into practice in a new Macbook Air. There has to be something to make the super-slim laptop relevant again in this increasingly iPad-loving world.
Clues that suggested a 3G Macbook was in the works were spotted last year by folks rooting around in Snow Leopard code but they could very well have been related to the iPad. Meanwhile, rumours of a Macbook Air 3G have been floating around for some time and stack up well with the latest patent.
Hit the comments and tell us: are you itching to get your hands on a 3G-packing Macbook?
Out TBC | £TBC | Apple (via Patently Apple)
