I’ve been assuming for a while now that Apple was close to giving up on the aging polycarbonate MacBooks, but apparently not: AppleInsider’s got a source saying that, pending a “industrial design overhaul,” they’re here to stay.

Lately, the plastic MacBook has felt like an unwanted orphan. It’s a tired generation-old design that looks stodgy next to the slick new unibodies, but without it, Apple’s cheapest laptop would cost $1200 a little too high for a lot of prospective Mac users, and most importantly, Laptop Hunters. (Think of the Laurens! The Jacksons!)

Apple needs something at or below the $1000 price point, but it’d help it it wasn’t a product that was designed in 2005. So, this:

Industrial design overhaul… will see them reemerge in the coming months with a slimmer, lighter enclosure and restructured internal architecture to boot.

This makes plenty of strategic sense, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turned out to be true, and if they well well below $1000. So, what would it look like? This description doesn’t really narrow things down, so it could just as easily be a design child of the unibodies as of the old polycarb. Or something new entirely, which would obviously be much more interesting

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