The future is solid state hard drives.
Which isn’t bad, as they’re pretty nifty.
Per AppleInsider, the 2011 MacBook Pro models are shipping with Mac OS X 10.6.6 (build 10J3210), which supplies TRIM support for bundled Apple Solid State Drives, enabling extended performance of the fast new devices via background maintenance.
The change comes a bit ahead of schedule as it had been previously reported that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion would incorporate support for the TRIM command, which helps the operating system coordinate the maintenance of unused memory cells on the new SSD devices, preserving long term performance.
While the new notebooks appear to run the same Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.6 version, the newer build (10J3210 versus 10J567, the newest build of Mac OS X 10.6.6 available for download from Software Update by other Macs) includes and automatically activates TRIM Support, as noted in System Profiler.
Apple will likely roll out support for the new feature in an upcoming new build of Snow Leopard. The feature reportedly only supports Apple-bundled SSD volumes, but this may change as well.
Stay tuned for additional changes as they become available and if you have any feedback as to your new 2011, Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro, please let us know what you think in the comments.