Apple came out of the gate swinging last week with a refresh to the MacBook Pro lineup. I had expected them to hold off on this kind of announcement until Steve Jobs took the stage at the WWDC later this month, but it looks like they either didn’t want to wait or they had bigger news to announce at WWDC. Either way, the MacBook Pro line has gotten a significant refresh.

The new notebooks sport Intel’s speedy new “Santa Rosa” Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which have been making their way under hoods of other manufacturer’s laptops for a few weeks now. The new chips come in at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz, giving the notebooks a speed bump as well as a processor upgrade. Right when the greater PC community was wondering when Apple would up the ante by adding the Santa Rosa chips to its laptops, Apple goes ahead and does it.

Also included are new LED-backlit, low-power, mercury-free displays. The new displays are brighter than their cold-cathode florescent light predecessors, obviously require less power to operate, and because they’re mercury free, they’re part of Steve Jobs’ new commitment to a greener Apple. The new displays have another benefit as well; along with being brighter, the new displays sport higher native resolutions than the previous generation, up to 1920×1200, which allows them to display video in true HD if you happen to get any onto your hard drive.

The new displays have a side benefit also; they can display the enhanced 3d graphics brought to the notebook by the new NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card included with each one. All of the new MacBook Pros have 802.11n and all of the other features of the previous generation built in. It’s a pretty substantial upgrade; one that would normally have been saved for a keynote speech, but I’m kind of glad it wasn’t. It gets the speculation going about what will be said, and gets those new MacBook Pros on the ground as quickly as possible. Now if I can find someone to buy my old Core Duo MacBook Pro, I might pick one up!

[ Apple :: MacBrook Pro ]