Laptop, notbook, tech news

China said its deadline for Web filtering software to be distributed with PCs had not changed on Tuesday, despite growing protests from the U.S. government and Chinese Internet users.

Foreign and domestic PC makers are still required to ship the filter program with all PCs sold in China beginning July 1, the state-run China Daily said, citing an unnamed source in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

China first issued the mandate last month and has said the software is meant to protect children from pornographic and other “harmful” content online. But the program, called Green Dam Youth Escort, also blocks political content including Web sites that mention Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned as a cult in China.

The mandate could escalate into a serious trade dispute if China actually bars foreign PC makers from selling computers without the software, said Simon Ye, a Gartner analyst. State media last week cited an unnamed official saying foreign PC makers like Dell might not be able to meet the deadline.

Some kind of compromise is much more likely before the deadline, said Ye. Barring sales by a company like Dell would disrupt China’s PC market and could trigger protectionist responses by the U.S., he said.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell were the second- and third-largest PC vendors in China in the final quarter last year, claiming over one-fifth of PC shipments in the country, according to IDC statistics.

Dell is still reviewing the government mandate, a company spokeswoman said, declining to comment further.

Resistance to China’s mandate has grown in the weeks since it became public. Representatives from multiple U.S. government offices met with Chinese officials last Friday to express concerns about the requirement to ship the software, said Susan Stevenson, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Embassy officials representing the State Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department met with officials at China’s MIIT and commerce ministry, she said.

The U.S. has asked China for a dialogue about the potential impact of the mandate on trade, effects on the free flow of information and “serious technical issues” raised by use of the software, Stevenson said.

Chinese Internet users have also mounted resistance to the mandate. Ai Weiwei, a well-known artist and dissident, was using Twitter messages on Tuesday to call for an Internet boycott the day of the government deadline. Ai urged Internet users not to go online on July 1 for work, email, news or other purposes.

“Do not give any explanation of your actions,” Ai wrote in his Twitter feed. “Make July 1 a day of commemoration for the Internet.”

Calls to China’s MIIT went unanswered Tuesday morning.

A development center built through a partnership between the Taiwan government and chip maker Intel plans to make the Moblin Linux operating system popular in small devices by creating applications as well as incubating a developer base on the island and in China.

The Moblin Enabling Center (MEC) in Taipei plans to increase its staff to 30 engineers, from 20 currently, by the end of this year as it seeks to dramatically increase the number of applications available for the Moblin operating system, according to Phoenix Lee, a section manager at the Moblin Enabling Center, which is run by Taiwan’s publicly funded Institute for Information Industry.

The group also plans to start reaching out to university students to build Moblin application development groups, she said. Initially, the MEC will work with National Taiwan University, considered the best school on the island, but it will expand to other schools in Taiwan and then to China. The MEC hopes to attract student software developers to Moblin through contests and the potential to make money through a Moblin application store similar to Google’s Android Market, which includes both free and for-pay downloads.

The MEC opened last December to promote Moblin among Taiwanese device manufacturers and create new applications. The operating system was optimized to work with Intel Atom microprocessors, low-power chips made for small devices. Taiwan contributed money, the lab and engineers to the MEC project, while Intel added technical expertise, a few full time engineers and marketing support.

Taiwanese product makers such as Acer and Asustek Computer will be able to test Moblin in their devices at the MEC, once the compliance testing center opens there later this year. A test kit will be available for Moblin v2.0 around August, followed by the release of the final version of the OS and then the opening of the testing center.

But test support is only part of the mission. Expanding the popularity and developer base are just as important.

“That’s (testing) not enough, we need lots and lots of applications to be successful,” said Lee.

A number of Linux software makers have already jumped on board with Moblin. Around 15 companies showed off their own versions of Moblin early this month at the Computex Taipei 2009 computer show, including Novell with its SUSE Moblin, as well as Red Flag, Xandros, Linpus and Wind River Systems, which has agreed to be bought by Intel.

One reason Taiwan is so keen on Moblin is because of a long history working with x86 chips such as Atom in computers. Taiwanese companies have been part of the PC industry for years, and x86 chips are a PC mainstay. Taiwan hopes to see Intel succeed in taking x86 chips into smartphones because government officials believe the island will have an advantage over rivals due to years of experience with the chips.

“Moblin is the OS optimized for the Intel Atom processor,” said Lee. “When Intel gets into smartphones on the x86 platform, we will be right there.”

Taiwanese companies are already leading the charge for Intel in small handheld devices similar to smartphones. Several companies have launched handheld computers Intel calls mobile Internet devices (MIDs), with slightly larger screens than most smartphones. Taiwanese manufacturer BenQ, for example, made the S6, which has already been launched by Italian mobile carrier TIM, while Gigabyte Technology created the M528, which is being sold by Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan.

Apple on Friday claimed victory in an environmental laptop tiff with Dell, which earlier complained that Apple was misleading buyers by calling its laptops “the world’s greenest family of notebooks.”

Dell had filed a complaint with the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, saying Apple’s use of the phrase was a “broad superiority claim” against all manufacturers’ laptops. NAD investigated the advertised tagline and implied claims that Apple’s laptops were “greener” than other brands.

After the investigation, NAD on Thursday said that consumers could be misled by Apple’s claims, which were used in Internet and TV advertisements. NAD suggested that Apple change the green tagline in advertisements to “avoid overstatement,” which otherwise could cause confusion among buyers, who might think MacBooks are superior to other laptops.

NAD evaluated Apple’s MacBooks based on the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) rating, a recognized standard that helps consumers compare PCs based on their environmental impact. NAD stated that Apple has high EPEAT ratings across its entire line of laptops, while no other manufacturer has “comparable high ratings for all of the notebooks it produces.”

Apple “elected to only produce computer notebooks that meet the highest EPEAT ratings,” NAD said in its Thursday ruling.

However, NAD found that certain laptop brands, such as Toshiba’s Portege line, had a higher EPEAT rating than MacBooks.

Apple did not comment on whether it would make changes based on NAD’s recommendations. However, a company spokeswoman said the recommendations confirm Apple’s commitment to being green.

“The NAD’s ruling is a clear victory for Apple. The case challenged our claim to the ‘world’s greenest family of notebooks,’ and NAD has confirmed that MacBooks are in fact the world’s greenest notebook computers when compared to other manufacturers’ product lines as a whole,” the spokeswoman said.

Dell did not respond to a request for comment.

Nonprofit environmental groups have backed Apple’s efforts to reduce the environmental impact of its PCs. Greenpeace International in 2007 applauded Apple’s commitment to phase out by 2008 the use on components and circuit boards of chemicals that could affect human health. Those chemicals included brominated fire retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

“That beats Dell and other computer manufacturers’ pledge to phase them out by 2009,” Greenpeace said at the time. Greenpeace also praised Apple’s “green” advertising campaign that highlighted the reduced environmental impact of its PCs.

Apple also gained ground in Greenpeace’s ranking of green electronics companies issued in March this year, while competitors including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo lost points. The list grades top consumer electronics and IT companies based on their environmental efforts and recycling efforts, as well as the power consumption and chemical content in their products.

Apple was perhaps the earliest PC maker to commit itself to reducing the environmental impact of its products, said Sarah Westervelt, a spokeswoman for the Basel Action Network, an environmental nonprofit. But no matter how green they are, laptops from all manufacturers will continue to have toxins, she said. Some circuit boards may have traces of lead and other harmful toxins, while batteries have chemicals such as cadmium that could be dangerous to health.

Dell and Apple are involved in a pointless slinging match, because green is an ambiguous concept, said Michael Kanellos, senior analyst and editor-in-chief at analyst firm GreenTech Media. It is hard to measure the entire environmental impact of products, he said. For example, the environmental impact of a laptop could involve the amount of fuel used to ship laptops and related components.

But using generic metrics such as power consumption, the overall impact of the laptops on the environment is relatively small, Kanellos said. Computers use about 1 percent of the power consumed in homes, while lights consume 26 percent, Kanellos said, citing 2006 statistics from the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University. In offices, computers make up 4 percent of power consumption, compared with 25 percent for lights.

Nevertheless, Dell and Apple realize that efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts associated with laptops, Kanellos said. Dell is advertising “green” as a way to cut costs for the company and its customers, while Apple is using it as a “lifestyle” term to sell products like the iPhone and Mac computers.

The re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi sparked demonstrations, and coverage of the protests led to the ouster of Western journalists. Twitter users stepped into the information gap, providing real-time updates. But the popular microblogging site also became a vehicle for protesters to launch denial-of-service attacks. While the conflict in Iran and the role of technology in keeping the world informed about it is our top story, for a whole lot of people the focus of the week was on — what else? — Apple’s new iPhone 3G S, which went on sale Friday. We confess to momentary early morning confusion about the line on Boston’s Boylston Street until we realized it was outside of an AT&T store. D’oh.

1. Twitter becomes a lifeline to an Iran in turmoil, Twitter plays key role in DoS attacks in Iran, In Iran, cyber-activism without the middleman and Iran rocked by cyberattacks during unrest: The Internet has become a prominent aspect of all important news stories, of course, but it has played a particularly vital role in helping to keep the world informed about what’s going on in Iran in the wake of the contentious presidential election.

2. Apple fans flock to buy iPhone 3G S: We’re not sure what more there is to say about the new iPhone 3G S, other than that a lot of people decided to forgo sleep to be among the first to buy one.

3. Jury orders music swapper to pay $1.92 million: We reckon that Jammie Thomas-Rasset wishes she had stuck with the US$220,000 fine after she was found guilty of online music trading and copyright infringement at her first trial. The Minnesota jury that heard the retrial of her case ordered her to pay a whopping $1.92 million, or $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was found to have illegally traded over the Kazaa online service. The ruling undoubtedly bolsters the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has gone after thousands of people in an effort to stop such music trading.

4. Senators challenge AT&T’s exclusive iPhone deal and FCC to probe exclusive mobile handset deals: U.S. senators questioned exclusive deals between mobile handset makers and carriers, notably AT&T’s deal as the sole iPhone provider in the U.S. By week’s end the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s acting chairman said he ordered staff there to look into the deals and whether they stifle innovation or (and?) harm consumers.

5. MySpace cuts ‘bloated’ workforce by 30 percent: The once high-flying MySpace, which has been dethroned by Facebook as the top U.S. social-networking site, axed almost 30 percent of its employees.

6. China orders Google to suspend foreign site searches and Fight against China’s Web-filtering software grows: In case there was any doubt, China showed that it means business when it comes to cracking down on Internet pornography, ordering Google to cease its foreign Web site search service because its filtering is weak. In related news, Solid Oak Software, which makes Web-filtering software, sent cease-and-desist letters to a number of U.S. and Chinese companies, contending that its code was copied by a Chinese Internet filtering program. Solid Oak demanded that the companies stop distributing the Chinese software.

7. Sun reportedly cancels 16-core Rock processors and Why Rock was doomed: Sun has bailed out on its 16-core Rock processor project, which had been a top priority. But an analysis of the project shows it was doomed even before Oracle swooped in to buy Sun, emphasizing its interest in the Solaris OS and Java.

8. Business netbooks: IT revolution or contradiction in terms?: For those who are contemplating using netbooks for business purposes, InfoWorld put together this handy comparison of four popular models, complete with a Test Center scorecard.

9. GhostNet cyber espionage probe still has loose ends: Many of the 103 countries whose computer systems were hacked in what has been labeled the “GhostNet” cybercrime operation, which was publicly revealed three months ago, may not yet have been formally notified that they were victims, according to a 53-page report.

10. Google trying for more Gmail security: Google is testing the use of HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Service) with Gmail to make the webmail service more secure. The move comes in response to privacy advocates urging Google to improve Gmail security.

A U.S. company that says its code was copied by a Chinese Internet filtering program has ordered more PC makers not to distribute the Chinese software.

Solid Oak Software has sent cease-and-desist orders to Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, Sony and Toshiba, following similar orders sent to Hewlett-Packard and Dell earlier this week, Solid Oak spokeswoman Jenna DiPasquale said in an e-mail Thursday.

The move added pressure over intellectual property theft to concerns that the Web filtering software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, could be used to bolster China’s censorship of the Internet.

China last month ordered PC makers to distribute Green Dam with all computers sold in the country after July 1. The program blocks both pornography and some political content, including Web sites that mention Falun Gong, the spiritual movement banned as a cult in China. China has said the program is meant to protect children and can be disabled or uninstalled.

Solid Oak last week found that the Chinese software used code written in the proprietary format used by CyberSitter, the company’s online content filter targeted at parents, DiPasquale said. The Chinese program contained blacklists and files apparently obtained from CyberSitter, according to a report by researchers at the University of Michigan.

An update distributed through the Chinese program has since disabled the copied blacklists, but the version available for download online does not yet reflect the changes, the researchers said in an addition to their report yesterday.

No one at the main company that developed Green Dam, Jinhhui Computer System Engineering, was immediately available for comment.

Solid Oak has not yet heard back from the PC makers it contacted, DiPasquale said. Its next steps could include seeking a U.S. court injunction to stop the companies from distributing Green Dam in China, she said.

An HP spokeswoman said the company is seeking more information regarding Green Dam in cooperation with the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a U.S. trade group. She confirmed HP had received Solid Oak’s cease-and-desist order, but declined to comment further on its response.

Lenovo said it is closely monitoring developments involving Green Dam and will continue to obey the law in the countries where it does business.

Industry groups including the ITI have called on China to reconsider requiring distribution of the software, and Chinese state media yesterday said foreign companies might not be able to comply with the mandate on time.

“All domestic PC makers are ready to include the software by July 1, but some foreign PC makers, such as Dell, might not be able to meet the deadline,” the China Daily quoted an unnamed official as saying.

Chinese Internet users have also filled Twitter streams and online forums with opposition to Green Dam.

Programming errors that left Green Dam vulnerable to some attacks have been patched since the University of Michigan researchers revealed them last week, their updated report says.

But a properly designed IP (Internet Protocol) address could still take control of a user’s computer through holes that remain in the patched program, the report says.

The researchers again advised uninstalling the program, calling it unlikely that all of its security problems could be fixed before the deadline for its distribution with PCs.

One patch also updated Green Dam’s help file with a license statement for OpenCV, an open source computer vision package developed by Intel, the report said. Green Dam’s image recognition tool for pornographic images draws on the package, according to the report.

Earlier versions appeared to violate OpenCV’s license by leaving out its text, the report said.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman defended China’s support for the program and declined to answer a question on its use of copied code at a press briefing Thursday.

“China has the responsibility and the obligation to protect its youth from violation by harmful online information,” the spokesman said.

Apple Inc.’s latest MacBook Pro laptops came with a number of upgrades to processor speeds, RAM and hard drives — not to mention reduced price tags.

Apple also reduced something else: the serial-ATA (SATA) drive interface, which dropped from 3Gbit/sec on earlier MacBook Pros to 1.5Gbit/sec. on newer ones.

The downgrade was initially picked up by Mac aficionados on the MacRumors.com Web site. Computerworld then confirmed the SATA change on a new 15-in. MacBook Pro as well as on the smaller, 13-in. model.

The issue has cropped up on Apple’s forums and on notebookreview.com.

It was not clear whether the SATA interface on the latest 17-in MacBook Pro or the ultra-thin MacBook Air were also revamped. Computerworld was unable to get an explanation from Apple about the change.

The move to a slower SATA interface has tech experts baffled, leading them to question whether Apple had encountered technical issues associated with the faster interface.

“I’m puzzled by it, as I know a lot of other people are. The only reason why I could think they would do it is there was some serious technical glitch — maybe the [processing] chip, maybe the optical drive,” said Tom Coughlin, founder of data storage consultancy Coughlin Associates Inc.

Coughlin said some industry rumors indicate there were issues with data transfer rates associated with the MacBook Pro’s optical drive, which has a 1.5Gbit/sec interface, “but usually the newer SATA interfaces are downward compatible with older interface products,” he added. “So I don’t even know why that would be a problem.”

Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., believes Apple may have been seeing data error problems at higher I/O rates with the 3Gbit/sec SATA interface. “It may be that those were higher error rates than they preferred,” he said.

McGregor noted that the slower SATA interface will not likely affect most MacBook Pro users, as the data transfers from traditional hard drives don’t saturate a 1.5Gbit/sec SATA interface, let alone a 3Gbit/sec interface. However, users with USB hubs connecting multiple external devices — such as flash drives or a hard disk drive — to a laptop or desktop computer might saturate the 1.5Gbit/sec SATA interface, hampering I/O.

The most obvious limitation of a slower SATA interface would be to SSDs, which are more than capable of fully using a SATA 1.5Gbit interface, with many of the drives boasting 230MB/sec sequential read rates, as well as write rates above 150MB/sec.

“It really depends on how much you hit them,” McGregor said. “In many cases, the average consumer isn’t going to be tapping into that full [1.5Gbit/sec] bandwidth, but memory-hungry applications like those for gaming, digital content creation and database applications will peg it and will limit the performance of an SSD.”

Using a hard drive interface like SATA for SSDs is not optimal for for the disks, which have gained popularity for their fast read speeds, lower power use and and ability to withstand physical shocks that can harm traditional drives. SSDs cost more per gigabyte than hard drives, and are offered as pricey options on all of Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops.

Given the speed with which SSDs can move data, most original equipment manufacturers are likely to eventually embed the NAND memory chips used by the drives onto the motherboards of computers in order to take full advantage of the I/O capabilities of non-volatile flash memory.

“Storage will begin to look more like a memory module than a hard drive,” said Dean Klein, vice president of Micron Corp.’s SSD group.

China will require that Web filtering software be included with all computers sold in the country, another step up in its efforts to control pornography and other content on the Internet.

The move follows a government crackdown on online smut that has led to the closure of thousands of Web sites this year, and concern that such campaigns could expand to target content that is political rather than pornographic.

PC makers will be required to pre-install the Web site-blocking program or offer it on a CD-ROM included with all PCs sold in China after July 1, according to a translation of a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology notification seen by IDG News Service.

The move is meant to protect youth from “unhealthy” information online, according to the statement.

The program, called Green Dam Youth Escort in Chinese, blocks only sites with pornographic content, and parents can turn it off, said Bryan Zhang, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, which designed the software.

But the measure triggered concern about wider censorship.

China blocked access to Web sites including Microsoft’s Bing search engine last week, adding to a list of previously banned sites including YouTube and some blog services. Twitter and Hotmail were also blocked ahead of the 20th anniversary last week of Beijing’s bloody crackdown on democracy protests, though those Web sites could load again on Monday.

Dell will consider including the software with new PCs only if its purpose is to block pornographic content from children, and only if it can be disabled, said Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China.

It will not install software that helps censor other Internet sites, Midha said. Midha also said Dell had not heard of any Chinese government notification ordering the program’s use.

Dell is the third-biggest PC vendor in China, according to research company IDC.

Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, China’s number one and two PC vendors, declined to comment.

Image recognition technology lets Jinhui’s program block individual images in addition to Web sites when they resemble sample pornographic images in a database, said Zhang, the company’s manager. Users are notified when updates are available for download, he said.

Jinhui’s Web sites says its program also prevents the use of proxy servers or circumvention software to visit banned sites, measures often used by savvy Internet users in China.

China’s government will pay for the first year of the program’s use for all PC buyers, after which they can buy the program from Jinhui, Zhang said.

Jinhui has previously worked with a research institute under China’s public security ministry on a blocking system for “harmful” online video clips, and has “long-term technical cooperation” with the army’s Information Engineering University, according to its Web site.

Jinhui won a government tender to distribute its software with PCs about a year ago, and has since worked with PC vendors to ensure compatibility and proficiency with the software, said Zhang.

The company has also worked with the government to put its software on PCs in schools, and hopes to market the product abroad, he said.

.Today all Apple rumors will either be satisfied or squashed during the keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. We’re just a few hours away from the presentation, and the tech world has been in full gear all weekend to get their final predictions out before the speech at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. So here are highlights of the latest rumor and speculation about Apple’s developalooza.

iPhone 3GS

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has weighed in with one last set of predictions on the possibility of a new iPhone. Gruber stands behind his prediction from several weeks ago of an iPhone with a faster processor, and double the RAM and storage of the current iPhone 3G. However, Gruber says he’s heard the codename for the new iPhone is iPhone 3GS, and he bets Apple will also use this moniker as the official name of the next iteration of the iPhone.

IPhone 3GS is the second name to be thrown around concerning the next iPhone. On Friday, we heard rumors the device might be called iPhone Video, which would highlight the new video capability believed to be built into iPhone OS 3.0. So if Gruber were right, what would the ‘S’ in iPhone 3GS stand for? Gruber’s best guess is it stands for “speed.”

For me, a name like iPhone Video or something similar makes more sense than iPhone 3GS. Simply because Apple product names typically follow a basic principle of marketing: use the brand name to identify product value. Consider iPod names like Nano, Mini, Shuffle and Touch, or even iPhone 3G. All of these identify something particular about the product, while iPhone 3GSpeed is just a general promise of improved performance. I’m not buying it, because iPhone 3GS just isn’t Apple’s style.

In other iPhone predictions, Gruber believes the new iPhone will have 15-20 percent longer battery life, and the current 8GB iPhone will downgrade to a $99 model — possibly until Apple runs out of stock of the iPhone 3G.

More blurry iPhone photos

More photographs purporting to be the next iteration of the iPhone have surfaced. The French blog Nowhere Else has photos of an all-black 16GB iPhone. Similar photos popped up last week on the Italian blog iSpazio. The photo sets from Italy and France coincide with previous claims by a Chinese electronics reseller that it is selling official spare parts for the next-gen iPhone. Among those parts was an all-black iPhone bezel, as opposed to the chrome ring that has gone around previous iPhone models.

Snow Leopard

Apple has already said it plans to distribute copies of Snow Leopard, the newest version of OS X, to developers at WWDC, with a public launch several months after. When it was announced at last year’s WWDC, Apple said Snow Leopard would focus on under-the-hood improvements with no new features. However, there has been speculation that Apple would add a few little goodies including a new look, codenamed “Marble.”

Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub weighed in on Snow Leopard saying he believes Apple will port the Core Location feature from the iPhone into the new version of OS X. That would allow your Mac to identify its location, which could then be used by your Mac’s dashboard applications and standard programs. Weintraub is also betting that Snow Leopard may work with ARM-based chips so that Apple can port the OS to tablets and so-called smartbooks. Other predictions from Computerworld’s blogger include out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange, and a new version of QuickTime with direct upload capability to YouTube and Mobile Me.

However, Gruber is also making some bets for Snow Leopard, saying the new OS will not have any new features as promised, and will not include the new Marble look. Gruber also says a free Snow Leopard upgrade for current Mac owners is out of the question due to how Apple interprets U.S. business accounting rules.

Both Gruber and Weintraub agree that Apple may sell Snow Leopard at a lower cost than typical OS upgrades for its Mac and MacBook lines.

MacBook Mobile?

Sticking his neck way out there, Weintraub is also betting that Apple may unveil MacBooks with 3G or WiMax capabilities, including the MacBook Air which could also see an upgrade to 4GB RAM.

The End is Near

At 10 a.m. Pacific, a team of Apple execs will take the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West for the WWDC Keynote Address. At that time we’ll know the fate of the rumored front-facing video camera, tethering capability, and FM transmitter for the iPhone. And we could learn more about the mysterious Apple Tablet. Then again, we could hear nothing new at all. The best way to find out is to tune into PC World for all the Apple-juicy details from WWDC.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul).

Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller wasted no time during the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday morning, unveiling a new generation of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops within minutes of taking the stage. (See PC World’s live blog coverage of the WWDC keynote.)

Apple’s aluminum unibody MacBook Pro line now includes 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch models. (PRNewsFoto/Apple)
The new 15-inch model sports processor speeds from 2.53GHz to 3.06GHz, at prices ranging from $1,699 - $2,299 depending on how it’s configured. The MacBook Pro can handle up to 8GB RAM, and a 256GB Solid State Disk (SSD) is also an option. Nvidia graphics, both integrated and discrete, are included.

The new 15-inch MacBook Pro is based on the same “unibody” architecture that Apple has used on the last round of MacBook Pro designs — a single slab of aluminum used to craft most of the body.

It features a built-in battery similar to Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro, which provides up to seven hours of run time between charges, according to Schiller — that’s two hours longer than before, or 40 percent more charge. Like the lithium polymer battery found in the 17-inch model, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro’s battery lasts up to 1,000 recharges before it needs replacing. Apple claims the battery design is more environmentally friendly as a result.

Schiller claims the 15-inch model has the “nicest display [Apple] has ever put in a notebook” with 60 percent better color gamut than before. What’s more, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro replaces the ExpressCard slot found on older models with an SD card slot — Schiller said this was done to better accommodate users who have digital cameras, many of which use SD media cards to store photos.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro model also gets a refresh; it now features a 2.8GHz processor, 500GB hard drive and keeps its ExpressCard slot, all for $2,499.

Both the new 15-inch and 17-inch models ship today.

Aluminum MacBook becomes MacBook Pro

The 13-inch MacBook has been improved, as well — so much so that Apple is adding the “Pro” moniker to it.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a lithium polymer battery similar to its 15-inch sibling, that lasts for up to seen hours. It also has the improved display, and it gains an SD card slot. The new 13-inch model can also accept up to 8GB of RAM, and can be outfitted with a 500GB hard disk drive or a 256GB SSD.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro also gets a FireWire 800 port, and a backlit keyboard standard. With prices starting at $1,199, it’s less expensive than the MacBook model it replaces.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro comes in two models: 2.26GHz, 2GB RAM, 9400M graphics, 160GB hard drive, for $1,119; and a 2.53GHz, 4GB, 250GB hard drive model for $1,499. Both models also ship today.

MacBook Air also improved

Lest we forget, the MacBook Air also gets a refresh. The $1,499 model comes equipped with a 1.86GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. For $1,799 you get a 2.13GHz MacBook Air equipped with a 128GB SSD. Prices have come down — that’s $700 less than before.

Macworld will update this story with more details about the new MacBooks presently.

Laptops and desktops could see software performance gains with parallel programming tools built into Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, which was introduced by the company on Monday.

A number of enhancements allows the OS, code-named Snow Leopard, to tap into the processing power of multiple CPU and graphics processing cores to boost software performance. The OS builds in multiple programming and software tools that divide up tasks for simultaneous execution across the cores.

Snow Leopard is more intelligent than its predecessors in taking advantage of hardware resources available to drive system performance, observers said on Monday. The OS also is better at identifying resources available and can accordingly allocate threads across multiple cores and processors, observers said.

The new tools in Snow Leopard include Grand Central Dispatch, a programming environment that breaks up tasks into multiple threads based on the number of cores and threads available. It also builds in native support for OpenCL, a set of programming tools to develop and manage parallel task execution.

“A lot of Macs will have supercomputers sitting there for free,” said Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group, the standards organization that defines the specifications for OpenCL.

Video processing in particular could see up to 50 times improved performance on Macs with the new OS, Trevett said. Video decoding could be a lot faster as pixel processing will be distributed across multiple CPU and graphics processing units in a system.

Snow Leopard’s evolution is tied to challenges hardware and software makers have faced in the past. The traditional way of boosting application performance on PCs was by cranking up CPU clock speed, said Linley Gwennap, president and principal analyst at The Linley Group. That led to software being written in a sequential mode for execution on a single core, with an increase in clock speed providing the boost in software performance.

Ultimately, cranking up clock speed led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption, and chip makers like Intel reverted to adding cores to boost performance. That brought a set of new issues to software developers, who faced the challenge of writing applications to take advantage of multiple cores to scale application performance.

“As the processor vendors brought forth dual-core and multicore processors, the operating systems guys have had to play catch up in terms of bringing out software that works with the new chips,” Gwennap said. Apple has unlocked a piece of the software puzzle, as parallel processing is the only way ahead to get big gains in performance, he said.

Apple has also laid the groundwork for software providers to write multicore applications with Snow Leopard, Gwennap said. But users may not see performance benefits until programmers stop writing applications for single-core processors and retrain themselves to write in parallel.

Another analyst agreed with Gwennap, saying that programmers aren’t used to thinking in parallel, even though the problem dates back to the 1940s.

“Programmers have to be educated to think about how to break down their program into multiple tasks that can execute simultaneously,” said Tom Halfhill, senior analyst at In-Stat, and senior editor of Microprocessor Report. Native support for OpenCL in Snow Leopard could encourage more programmers to write in parallel.

OpenCL is a programming framework that includes a C-like programming language with a few APIs to manage distribution of kernels across hardware like processor cores and other resources.

Apple’s push of parallelism to desktops and laptops could ultimately reach smartphones, Halfhill said.

“Ultimately Apple could go migrate it down into products like their iPhone,” Halfhill said.

But Microsoft isn’t far behind Apple, Halfhill said. Microsoft is trying to bring in additional multicore execution capabilities with its upcoming Windows 7 operating system through a new DirectX set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Earlier versions of Windows — like Windows XP and Vista — have been panned by observers for failing to take advantage of multiple cores in CPUs to boost application performance.