Ah, the rhythm of life: we ruminate on Apple rumors, the Apple store comes down, the Apple store becomes available, new Apple products appear. One of those rumors was around LED backlighting of Mac notebooks and after the store disappeared from the ether and then returned, we see that the rumor was true…partially. You can now get an LED backlit screen on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, but not the 17-inch model. The big brother in the family does have the entertaining option of a 1920 x 1200 display, however; great for us high-def folks.

The new offerings also include Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs up to 2.4 GHz, up to 4 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with up to 256 MB of dedicated video memory. Pricing starts a $1,999 for the new 15-inch models; I can’t wait to see what the impact of the LED backlighting has on the battery life which was already good in my experience.