Photo of the rumored Subnotebook?

Could this be a photo of the rumored ultra-portable laptop to be released at MacWorld? You never know…

This image, posted to a MacRumors forum thread by a brand new user “greenrabbit,” depicts a current generation MacBook Pro alongside a much thinner, but otherwise identical notebook, save for that wonderfully horrible-looking (multi-touch?) trackpad.

My take: while it isn’t impossible that a brand new user might have some insider info, This is a fake in my mind for a number of reasons. First, I’d hope to the heavens that Apple would not make a trackpad that enormous, even for multi touch. If you are going to multi-touch, it needs to be on-screen, in direct contact with what you manipulate. It’s not the trackpad that bothers me, but the button. I don’t think Steve would let that huge button fly. With the grainy image quality, manipulating this image would not be hard at all.

I suspect that whoever made the photo took a picture of two MacBook Pros, and cut a little off the bottom of one and enlarged the trackpad. The shadows are also slightly off,as are the ports on the side, but the light (most likely purposefully) washes it out too much to tell.

I do like the thinness of that machine, however, and if this is what is introduced at MacWorld, I won’t be impressed, but I won’t be underwhelmed either.

Read [MacRumors Forum]