Apple Leaps Forward With Snow Leopard - Page 2

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Faster, longer lasting MacBooks

Apple's Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, dove right into the hardware news kicking off the event. Normally hardware announcements aren't fodder for a developer conference, much less to lead off the show, but Apple likes to think different.

He announced a new 15-inch MacBook Pro with the same unibody design Apple introduced last year. This new MacBook Pro uses the same lithium polymer battery found in the larger, 17-inch model and provides seven hours of battery life (two extra hours more than the earlier model). It can also be recharged 1,000 times, instead of 300 times, before losing its efficiency or eventually needing replacement.

"That means five years of battery life for the average user before they see a diminished charge, and that's longer than a typical notebook life," Schiller said.

The new MacBook also features a brighter color screen and uses an SD memory card, commonly used in digital cameras, plus a big boost in internals. Users can now get it with as high as a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB of memory and 500GB of storage.

The starting price has been cut to $1,699, a $200 cut, although that's with a slower processor and less memory and storage. Schiller also announced the 17-inch MacBook Pro is getting a $300 price cut to $2,599. The prices are effective today and the new MacBook is in stores today.

Apple's low-end 13-inch MacBook is also getting the new battery for seven hours of performance, the backlit keyboard found on the 15- and 17-inch MacBooks, the SD Card slot and a FireWire 800 port. It's being renamed MacBook Pro and pricing begins at $1,199.

The ultra-thin MacBook Air got a price trim, starting now at $1,499, plus has a faster processor option. Users can now get a 2.13GHz processor in the high-end Air, which also shed $700 in price, to $1,799.