That 17-inch MacBook Pro is a thing of beauty, no doubt. But we have some reservations.  First of all, the five years of battery charges couldn't have been tested (tech didn't exist five years ago).   Lithium Polymer might age poorly or differently in different conditions.  We are willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt but know we have been dealt a bit of a wild card there.  Also we know the five hour batteries typically last three hours, so should we expect these 7/8 hour batteries to last 5/6 hours?

Next, that enclosure doesn't just enclose the battery but it also encloses the hard drive (see no seams in video below).  And you only have a few (Apple only) options out of the box.  The biggest drive you can walk away with is a 320GB.  You can easily replace an Apple drive on a 13 or 15 with one of the many 500GB 2.5 inch SATA drives out there.  Hrmmmph. 

Apple also offers SSD drives in 128 and 256 GB sizes for $500 and $900 respectively.  We'd also like to replace the SSD if/when we choose to.  In a couple of years into that five year battery life, bigger SSDs will cost much much less.  It would be nice to be able to upgrade without major surgery. (more below)

Frankly we like to see a little more hardware at events but the 17 inch MacBook was pretty close to our description last week.  The $50 matte version should make people both happy and sad - as wil lthe internal long life battery.  We'd be lying if we said we didn't want one...with 8Gb (will we be able to up our smaller MacBooks to 8Gb)?   No Mini or iMac however was rough.  We have a feeling they are coming.

iLife and iWork are both looking pretty exciting.   iWork.com is pretty close to what we envisaged.  There were lots of gray areas where we missed some stuff but we think we got the major gist of it across.  GarageBand learn-to-play is exactly what we had heard.  And the Magic hint?  Cool transitions in iWork.  They are Fun!

iTunes.  The end of the DRM era.  Now we don't have to visit Amazon (but probably will continue for the dealz).  Amazon still beats Apple on price but iTunes is more convenient.

Apple Stock isn't really reacting (update - whoops - it is tanking).

Overall however, we were left....wanting...although the Macrumorslive (best feed out there)  getting hacked was entertaining.  And obviously we have an Apple Mac hardware event coming up.

We'll put up Apple's videos as they become available.  What did you think?

We are firin' up the livepanel again this year with Engadget, Macrumors, Gizmodo and Computerworld sites all set to be included.  If any go south, we'll hook up a few backups.  As a bonus, we are hoping to get some Qik live camera feeds but are wary of the bandwidth in the hall during the event.  The show starts at noon eastern time, 9am pacific but stop in early to see the pregame show.

Remember, this page refreshes automatically so your trigger finger won't be bloodied refreshing pages.  It is also big and works best on a 24 inch screen or bigger.

Get there!

iWork.com, a domain that Apple has owned for a long time is set to go live this week with a public beta of the new iWork collaboration package.  We went over this briefly before but need to clarify our previous statements a bit.

iWork.com will be a online site where you can share and view (but not yet edit) iWork documents online.  Workgroups will be alowed to share documents, comment on documents and view them to a certain extent in the browser window.  We haven't recieved clarification of how well this will work and how many capabilities this will have. Somewhere between reading a Pages document and viewing a full multimedia Keynote presentation we'd guess.

We expect it to go live tomorrow.

We've had two sources corroborate that Apple isn't putting together a home server just yet but instead is going to update Time Capsule at some point in the very near future (Macworld?).  The update is relatively minor and the biggest feature is that it will allow the Time Capsule to cache software updates for all Macs on the network.  This functionality exists in Leopard Server and would be nice to have in a home device - especially as updates get bigger and bigger. 

We've gotten a flurry of late reports that there is in fact a removable battery in the 17-inch laptop.     We don't know what to make of it yet.  IT is probably noise/distraction but  maybe Apple has been pulling an Asteroid (seeding incorrect information to employees) or there are two batteries in the laptop.  One removable and one that stays inside.  More to follow as this develops....

Oh, also the Mac Pro is going to see some small form factor changes (possibly at Macworld).  We also expect Core i7 processors and NVIDIA 9800 chipsets.

Then there is iWork.com...more coming as we piece it all together..

Here's another one for next week.  We know it seems a bit nuts but try to stay with us here, OK? 

Word on the street is that Garage Band users will be able to buy celebrity music lessons from Apple.  For instance, if you are a drummer, you might be able to purchase for $6.99, a drumming lesson from Neil Peart (we don't know the specific artists/prices involved).  You then download the lessons and in a few (thousand) weeks you are hammering away YYZ like nobody's business. 

Yep, it isn't just iWork.  iMovie is moving into the Cloud as well.   As Stevo said:

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Check the details at Computerworld...

TUAW is reporting that the Mac Mini will now be  a little black and aluminum box which will match the color scheme of the iMac.  The optical drive will now be a option according to the site and the lip of the box will partially conceal the nature of the optical drive much like the Time Capsule.  While we are still trying to figure out exactly what this will look like, it does make some sense to move in that direction. 

TUAW goes on to confirm that the launch will be at Macworld and the optional optical drive will likely be SATA which are both pretty standard rumor fare at this point.  Also, expect a NVIDIA 9400 Chipset and updated processor and hard drive options that miror MacBook options.

We just got a truckload of Macworld information dumped on us from our best source.  As we piece it together we'll trickle it out.  The first big piece of information is that iWork is going into the Cloud.  Not just storage, either.  We are talking interface for Numbers, Pages and Keynote (which is going to see some interesting new templates and transition additions).   Yes, the iWork applications are now going to be Web Applications.

This isn't a huge surprise as the industry (Google, Microsoft, Zoho) is heading in this direction.  Questions remain that we'll try to get sorted ASAP.  Will this work on iPhone/iPod touch?  Will there be traditional apps that go along for offline access - or will this use Safari's new Offline DB/SproutCore framework functionality?  Stay tuned...