Digital Home Thoughts: Spotlight Turns to Notebooks Part 2: The New MacBook Pros

"The marriage of electronics and mechanical design makes the new MacBook Pro as advanced on the inside as it is on the outside. The internal architecture has been reengineered from the silicon up. There's a new logic board. A new chipset. And a new graphics architecture - a feat of engineering in itself. Many notebook computers sacrifice graphics performance in order to save battery life. The new MacBook Pro offers the best of both worlds, thanks to not one, but two separate graphics processors."

To keep the pros happy, Apple also gave the MacBook Pro a big update today. While they left the 17" monsters out of the mix for the day, the 15.4" models got new screens, new keyboards (essentially, they got the original MacBook keyboards), a high-end graphics chip from NVIDIA (the GeForce 9600M GT), and a new glass-topped trackpad without a button. Unlike its lower-end sibling, the MacBook Pro keeps its Firewire 800 port, and also picks up the Mini DisplayPort video adapter. Prices start at $1999 for the entry-level model and $2499 for the higher-end model, which offers 4 GB of memory, a 2.53 GHz processor, and a 320 GB HD. The 17" monster remains untouched for now, but it stands to reason that they'll be updated at some point soon.