MacBook Pro

Top 10 Macworld rumors for 2009

Apple's (AAPL) last Macworld Conference and Expo opens Monday at San Francisco's Moscone Center, but the real action starts Tuesday at 9 a.m. PT (12 noon ET) with senior vice president Phil Schiller's opening remarks -- the first Macworld keynote not delivered by Steve Jobs since 1997.

Nobody's expecting breakthrough products that rise to the level of the iMac (Macworld 1998), the iBook (1999), iTunes (2001) or the iPhone (2007), but MORE

The $800 rumor that spoiled Apple's party

Blame Duncan Riley.

Last Wednesday, he posted an "exclusive"  on his blog -- The Inquisitr -- under the headline: "Apple to launch $800 laptop." Although his scoop was unsourced, the news that Apple was set to announce its cheapest notebook computer ever was picked up by Apple blogs and mainstream publications around the world -- including the New York Times. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi even published a spreadsheet calculating how MORE

Apple's new MacBooks: What to expect today

With only hours to go before Apple (AAPL) unveils its new lineup of MacBooks, the rumor sites have been working overtime, trying to make sense of blurry spy photos and purloined price lists.

But on Tuesday morning, Daring Fireball's John Gruber -- a blogger with particularly good sources in Cupertino -- cut through the fog and offered some clarity.

According to Gruber's remarkably detailed report:

The photo here of a MacBook Pro, which MORE

Analyst: New MacBooks will start at $899-$999

In a report to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster added some meat to the bare-bones invitation Apple sent out a couple hours earlier. (See here and here.)

The most important news, according to Munster, is that Apple for the first time since it discontinued the iBook will be offering its premium notebook computers below the psychologically-important $1,000 barrier. Specifically:

Higher quality, lower-priced MacBooks. Munster expects the new MacBooks, which currently sell MORE

Has Steve Jobs built a secret MacBook factory?

''I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer,'' Steve Jobs told Fortune 18 years ago, describing the 40,000-square-foot plant he had constructed in Fremont, Calif., to manufacture circuit boards for his ill-fated NeXT, the $10,000 workstation into which Jobs poured his heart and soul after he was forced out of Apple (AAPL) in 1985.

The factory, as Jobs described it, had everything: robots, lasers, tolerances within one MORE

All eyes on the MacBook

With this year's iPhone and iPod updates behind them, Apple watchers have shifted their attention to the products that matter most to the company's bottom line: the MacBook and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs likes to refer to the Mac as one of the three legs of Apple's stool (the iPod and iPhone being the other two). But that makes for a pretty tippy stool; Macs represent more than MORE

Apple's Fall product lineup

None of this is set in stone -- especially as long as Steve Jobs retains the prerogative to change his mind at the last minute -- but AppleInsider has posted the most definitive road map to date of Apple's (AAPL) fall product lineup.

Citing unnamed "people familiar with the situation," AppleInsider's Kasper Jade ticks off a schedule of release for a batch of new iPods, overhauled notebooks and refreshed iMacs, confirming MORE

Apple teases with mysterious 'product transition'

The biggest mystery to come out of Apple's Q3 earnings conference call Monday -- besides the state of Steve Jobs' health -- was the "future product transition" that CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned as one of the three reasons he expects the company's gross margins to fall from 34.1% to 31.5% over the next three months.

For a company that doesn't talk about future products, Apple spent a lot of time Monday talking MORE

What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators - with sessions on "Advances in OpenGL" and "What's New in Objective-C" - were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple's CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched MORE

Buyer's Guide: MacBook OK to buy; iPhone only if you need it

MacRumors has issued an update of its immensely useful Buyer's Guide -- a consumer-oriented cheat sheet that tracks the update cycle of Apple's product line and offers informed opinions about whether you should go ahead buy that MacBook Pro you've been lusting after or wait for the next model. As MacRumors put it:

Apple updates their products in a very consistent manner. A Mac comes out at a certain price with MORE