Have you been to Mars when Apple early this January announced the new MacBook Pro 17 unibody?
Time to refresh your memory, since it’s now available!

At first glance, you could easily mistake the new 17-inch MacBook Pro for its predecessor, the legendary 17-inch PowerBook G4 ( ; January 2006 ). The new model has roughly the same dimensions—at 15.4-by-10.4-by-1.0 inches and 6.8 pounds, it’s a shade wider, but a tenth of a pound lighter—and it retains the familiar aluminum enclosure and sleek design.

Inside, however, the new top-of-the-line Apple laptop incorporates not only a completely different processor, but a slew of other changes you should consider before deciding whether—or when—this is a machine for you. (you should…)

The MacBook Pro 17″ desktop replacement of Apple can also be classified as a multimedia notebook, because of its 3.1 kg and only 2.59 cm height.

Feature list at a glance:

Still have to sort out all stuff that’s been announced yesterday.
In a nutshell:

Apple MacBook Pro 17″ with unibody, 8-hour battery (even though non user-replaceable) and up to 8 GB RAM (!!!)

iLife ‘09 which, along with all updates, introduces an interesting Garageband feature: music school lessons with the best artist around!

iWork ‘09
that introduces iWork.com, right now a public-beta online service for document sharing

iTunes pricing changes:

(check our partner site iPodPalace.com about this iTunes-related topic)

Highly recommended: check these Garageband previews with music lessons from selected artists!

Partner site MacSwitching.com attended Apple’s presentation of new products like the MacBook Air and Time Capsule.

There’s a dedicated photo gallery about all new January 2008 Apple products available here.

First impressions?
MacBook Air is perfectly usable; keyboard layout is just like MacBook’s and the new LED display is much brighter and sports a wider viewing angle.

What really impresses is how fine the MacBook Air, as well all other Macs integrate with Time Capsule and get easier the usually tedious task of backing up data on a regular base using Leopard’s Time Machine feature.

Let’s admit it: from day one that Apple introduced Leopard’s Time Machine, finding an adequate hard disk to fit the tedious task of backing up our data has been quite a problem.
More problems for a multi-user home (more and more out there).

Meet Apple Time Capsule, right from the same MacWorld Expo where MacBook Air was born!

What’s inside Time Capsule?
- an Airport Extreme 802.11N base station, well known and quite proven,
- three Gigabit ethernet ports,
- one USB port for printer sharing,
- a 500GB or 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA server-grade hard disk drive
- same sleek form factor of Apple TV.

The hard disk is available to all connected Leopard users as the preferred Time Machine default storage device.

(By the way, Tiger and Windows users are allowed to access the disk too…)

Available for pre-order in 500 GB an 1 TB flavors, the Time Capsule retails US$299.99 and US$ 499.99 respectively.

Apple iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 available!

Following the recent August announcements from Apple, iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 are now avalaible.

The new iLife ‘08 features the same component softwares as before, same name but some are really brand new.

Concerning iWork ‘08, the package includes:

No Mac user should miss these packages.
No Mac business user should miss taking a closer look to iWork ‘08: a great way to get for US$ 75 a complete Business Software Suite.

Better late than never (see Sourcecrowd’s previous report here) Apple Apple’s new OS X iteration is coming: a definite sign that the Leopard will not suffer further delays is that it is now available for pre-order from a few outlets. So if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on the latest and greatest features when the 10.5 version of the operating system ships in October, click on the Apple links in this post to reserve your copy.

To see some of the nifty new feautures of Leopard and for more information, go to Apple’s website. Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard has a retail price of $129.

Apple has announced an update to its MacBook Pro line of notebooks with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, memory up to 4GB thanks to the new “Santa Rosa” chipset architecture, and high-speed graphics with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. The 15-inch model sports a new mercury-free, power-efficient LED-backlit display, while the 17-inch model has an optional high-resolution 1920-by-1200 display. Rounding up the high end specs, all models include a built-in iSight video camera, MagSafe Power Adapter, and built-in 802.11n wireless networking.

Every MacBook Pro includes an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB of shared L2 cache, an 800 MHz frontside bus and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory, with 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz processor options for the 15-inch models, and a 2.4 GHz processor powering the 17-inch.

For full specs and availability visit the Apple website. Basic configurations and pricing are as follows:

$1999. 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo. 2GB RAM, 120GB HD, 15″ LED. GeForce 8600M GT 128MB
$2499. 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo. 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, 15″ LED. GeForce 8600M GT 256MB
$2799. 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo. 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, 17″. GeForce 8600M GT 256MB