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Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.
The press release at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/06itunes.html claims "... in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points--69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29--with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29."
This would seem to indicate that the average price should fall, and that there will be no $2.50 tracks.
Of course they could do a removable battery. The point they made in the keynote was that a removable battery takes up a bunch of space. By making the battery non-removable, they gained 40% more room for a bigger, longer-lasting battery. The design trade off here was removable battery for more battery life. The market will decide whether that was a good trade.
You should look at the x-ray images they showed. You do indeed lose even more that 30% of your space. And this is pretty obvious too since the fill factor for cyllinders is on that order. They went to flat pack batteries.
So they not only made the battery last longer but it also is thinner.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.