So the knights of the Blogosphere are on duty as always, reporting live from Apple’s Spotlight Turns To Notebooks” event in their own back yard in Cupertino, allowing us mere mortals to glimpse Apple’s announcements even as they unfold. With the whole show over not two hours ago, we’re happy to report to you the summary of the goings-on.
Steve Jobs does not disappoint and gets right in there, leading the presentation himself from the get-go, as lively as ever, despite the old chestnut about his health that reporters beat like a dead horse.
After greeting everyone, Steve temporarily passes the torch to Steve Cook, who does a little mandatory bragging about Mac sales, which were up to 2.5 million in the last quarter, and constituted two thirds of the market growth several quarters in a row.

Of course, the main reason for this is superior computers, according to Cook who he goes on to list others, including compatibility ensured through Boot Camp and Windows support with Fusion and Parallels. The fourth reason, which got everyone laughing, was Vista and its poor reception. He went on to talk about PC vs. Mac ads, and even showed a new one. Finally, the sixth reason he cited is retail stores: 400,000 visitors a day, half of them new to the Mac, and two new stores in Beijing and Sydney off to a great start.

After a few more statistics Steve once more took over and presented the new fabrication technique that got everyone talking; the so-called Brick. He calls in Jony Ive to present it. First, he shows the traditional way of building the internal frame of a MacBook Pro, and the problem of building such a thin product while also making it strong. The alternative, Ive proposes, is building the internal frame from a single piece of aluminum. This way, it’s stronger and lighter.
The process, of which the new MacBook Air is the end result, consists of taking a thick piece of aluminum, cutting it to increasingly smooth levels, and then anodizing it. "Through each stage we're cleaning, collecting, and recycling the material. We started with a 2.5lbs piece of metal and end up with a piece that weighs a quarter of a pound," says Ive. This means that the new manufacturing technique isn’t wasteful, quite the contrary. Apple is really going for an ecological approach to MacBooks with the new line.

Steve then returns talking about the new graphics chips Apple is putting in their notebooks. They’ve switched from Intel Integrated Graphics to NVIDIA, and they’re the first on the market to incorporate the new GeForce 9400M chips in their notebooks, and they’re all but drooling over what it can do: “Chipset and GPU on one die -- 70% is the GPU, 16 parallel graphic cores, 54gflops of graphics performance. It's a sunner,” says Jobs who is psyched out on the 5x graphics speed, compared to what they’ve been using so far. He claims it translates to up to 6x actual performance.
Another significant change to the new MacBook pro is the new large multitouch trackpad, which is made of a glass, has a 39% larger tracking area, multiple buttons which are programmable via software and gestures for one, two, three or four buttons. Jobs commented on the latter, calling them "A new way to open expose, and a great way to app switch..."
The new MacBook Pro that Apple is unveiling today has this glass trackpad, the 9600M chip, and thanks to the new shell fabrication process, it’s much lighter and thinner. Steve passed one of the shells around to the audience so they can see for themselves.

Steve said that the MacBook Pro will include either the 9600M GT or the 9400M, the former yielding higher gfx performance, the latter allowing for a higher battery life, of five hours.
Other odds and ends include “Slot load super drive, MagSafe connector, Ethernet, Firewire 800, dual USB, mini display port, we're going to that on all our products, Expresscard 34, and the battery indicator is now on the side," Jobs said. The two configurations cost $1999 and $2499 respectively.

Steve also introduced the MacBook Air, the lighter side of the MacBook line, with a 9400M graphics chip, a 120GB hard drive and a mini display port. There’s also a second configuration with a 128GB SSD and a 1.86 GHz CPU. The two models will also cost $1799 and $2499.

There’s also a new MacBook. The old one will still sell, but gets a price drop to $999, a little bit higher than media estimates. The new one, sporting the same casing, backlit LED display, glass trackpad etc. as the other new arrivals, only it’s smaller and lighter. The first model will set you back $1299 for the new MacBook 13.3-inch display, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, “that’s $700 more affordable for these Pro features,” says Jobs. The second one, with 4GB of RAM, 320 GB HDD and a backlit keyboard will cost $1599.

All the new models are shipping tonight and should hit stores tomorrow. Well folks, that’s all about the new notebooks for now. There’s a ton of new tech, interesting innovations and the prices aren’t that bad either. Apple does not disappoint.
One more point of interest though, at the start of the Q&A session with Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the end of the event, Phil forewarned reporters: “A few caveats, we can't answer questions about the quarter ending, and secondly... 110/70... This is Steve's blood pressure." The room burst into laughter and applause.