What they really sacrificed here was the opportunity to make a compelling product. It's 2011, when have you last time used an optical drive?

Frankly, I haven't needed an optical drive in a laptop since booting from USB drives became practical a few years ago. (happy MacBook Air user here)

It'll be interesting to see if Apple fleshes out its Cinema display into a combined docking station and screen using the Thunderbolt port's potential. Add a DVD drive, HDD for Time Machine, USB/Firewire controllers, ExpressCard slot, whatever, using the PCIe channel in the Thunderbolt.

I see where you're standing. But actually I receive two DVDs per week in my mailbox, so last time was today. And I still buy CDs, yes.

I think what you really want is the next iteration of the Air with whatnot is missing from the current model.

The only situation where I could imagine an external CD-Rom to get in the way would be for watching DVDs on the go. But afaik even for that most people copy the movie to the harddrive beforehand - to prevent the drive from sucking the battery dry while watching.

I see the MBP as a laptop to use plugged in a socket and with a lan cable at home, work, a client's place or a library, and only need decent portability and battery life. For all other uses I'd prefer the ipad or the Air(wish I get the $$ for it).

Do I use it as often as I did, say, 10 years ago? No, but I can imagine why Apple would leave it.

1st thing I did when I receive my Snow Leopard DVD is to RIP it to my firewire HDD.

See the Intel Core i7 2620M (the 2.7Ghz part in the high-end 13" model) spec sheet for example: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52231

Also worth checking out is what scale they are made at, I remember some of the core i processors were only being made at the higher nanometers scale (e.g. older less heat efficient technology).

It would be ironic if the Core i5 four core model was more battery efficient and produced less heat than the core i5 two core models...

Edit: no, I'm not referring to the recent thing with the sandy bridge architecture, but a previous architecture. Did some more research and it sounds like back in September some of them were produced at 32 nanometers and others were produced at 45 nanometers. Also there may have been some initial problems going to their new 32nm process.

Presumably by now they've got the issues that I remembered sorted out (so that they can have new and different issues like sandy bridge ports and so forth).