Steve Jobs, along with Jony Ive and other senior Apple VPs, today announced a major refresh to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lineup. The new systems incorporate a new manufacturing process, are machined from a single slab of aluminum, as well as being manufactured with components that are free of toxic materials such as arsenic, brominated flame retardants, PVC and mercury. The new models are powered Intel Core 2 Duo processors and by nVidia graphics chips; they are delivered with processor speeds of 2.0 and 2.4 GHz for the MacBook models, and 2.4, 2.53 and 2.8 for the MacBook Pro models. The MacBook Air has received a refresh, as well, with improved graphics and optional 128GB solid state hard drive.

Also announced was an upgrade to the Apple Cinema Display - the latest incarnation has an LED, thin profile 24" display with a built-in iSight and an integrated power adapter for MacBook and MacBook Pro systems.

Technorati Tags: macbook, macbook air, macbook pro

Apple has released an extremely important security update for Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.5. Security Update 2008-007 contains updates to numerous components of Mac OS X, including Apache, ClamAV, ColorSync, CUPS, Finder, launchd, libxslt, MySQL Server, Networking, PHP, Postfix, PSNormalizer, QuickLook, rlogin, Script Editor, Single Sign-On, Tomcat, vim and Weblog. Due to the number of components and the nature of the multiple, highly critical vulnerabilities, updating systems as soon as possible is highly recommended.