Here’s something we don’t do often at World of Apple, offer speculation on upcoming products without concrete evidence. Today Mac Rumors published an article speculating on the photos that surfaced over the weekend of what we believe to to be the cases for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks.

First of all let’s all be clear that these are certainly not Photoshop jobs but they may well be early prototypes.

Mac Rumors tackles two subjects in its post, first of all speculating on what it claims is an unknown video out port as well as what exactly is underneath that covered area on the MacBook Pro case.

Port in question is fifth from the right.

So first up the video out port which appears on both the MacBook and MacBook Pro; weeks before these images surfaced AppleInsider published an article stating that the MacBook Pro would lose its full dual link DVI-I port and will instead be replaced with “what appears to be” a Mini-DVI port. Looking at the images in question it is a fair certainly what port this is.

To add further credence let’s measure the ports, a standard USB port is somewhere in the region of 5mm in height and 15 mm wide. A mini-DVI port is around 5mm in height and 10mm in width. Those proportions certainly work.

With immense certainty I can state that this port is a mini-DVI, but this does raise the question on how exactly Apple intends to run a 30-inch display from the MacBook Pro as mini-DVi can only handle a maximum resolution of 1920×1200 @60Hz.

Now lets look at that covered area which can be seen on the far left of the image above. Although Mac Rumors doesn’t directly speculate it does offer some of the crazy suggestions that have hit its forum over the weekend; iMac docking port, DisplayPort and eSATA connection have all made an appearance in discussions.

A bit of common sense needs to brought in here, firstly why would Apple put all the ports in one area and then put the another port completely in a different area, this would cause the mainboard designers a nightmare and would not at all be functional.

I don't see a port here?

The above image is the view of the ports from the other side of the case, as you can see every other port has a clear view to the pink bubble wrap below but in the unknown area is a black object with what looks like some metal mouldings. Granted the tape would prevent the surface below being visible but I don’t even see what looks anything remotely like a hole in the case.

As much as I personally respect Mac Rumors this empty speculation helps nobody, then again the above text is empty speculation with a hint of evidence…