Wanna hear this morning’s news?

The Pre will have games.

Dell attacks Psion’s “Netbook” trademark.

iPhone turn-by-turn GPS.

Yelp accused: Suppressing negative reviews?

Dismantling 17-inch MacBook Pro.

$50 for unlimited phone calls.

Google demos iPhone offline Gmail.

Dell debuts Mini 10 Netbook.

Google Street View case dismissed.

Lenovo making jumbo-sized netbooks?

Sprint loses a million customers.

The new MacBook Pro is the second Apple notebook with a sealed battery (last year’s MacBook Air being the first). It also joins all iPods and the iPhone. It seems entirely possible that Apple will eventually sell no products with removable batteries, starting whenever it replaces the current 13- and 15-inch MacBook designs.

While Apple’s video didn’t explicitly confront the obvious objections to a notebook design with a battery that can’t be removed, its reasoning is obvious. The primary reasons you’d want to remove a laptop’s battery are to swap in a new one for longer cord-free productivity, and because batteries lose their ability to be fully recharged over time. The company says that the 17-inch MacBook Pro runs for an impressive “up to” 8 hours on a charge, and that it can be fully recharged 1000 times, versus a few hundred times for most laptops. Therefore, historic reservations about sealed batteries are no longer an issue. Right?

Well, maybe. I’m instinctively cautious about the idea of a battery I can’t remove. (I had toted a second one with me when I liveblogged yesterday’s keynote, just in case.) But Apple’s claims about the new battery leave me willing to at least consider the notion of a sealed notebook. (I want, of course, to read what kind of battery life folks other than Apple say the new MacBook Pro has–I’ve never owned any notebook from any manufacturer that consistently came anywhere near the promised “up to” amount of life.)

That’s just me. I’m curious whether Apple’s move will have any influence on the rest of the industry. Offhand, I know of no other company that sells sealed laptops. (HP sells optional batteries based on technology from Boston Power that also promises 1000 recharges, but they’re traditional replaceable models.) One suspects that most other manufacturers will be a lot more cautious–Apple is simply bolder about making seemingly sacrilegious design decisions that other computer companies. Often for good, sometimes for worse. And I’ll bet most IT department staffers within big companies would recoil at the idea of laptops with fixed batteries.

Of course, if the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is a smash hit, all bets are off, and we might see sealed designs catch on really quickly. For now, though, I’m still thinking that a meaningful percentage of people who might otherwise be enthusiastic about a 17-inch Mac notebook will be intimidated, at least, by Apple’s decision.

How about you?

Yes, the rumors of Apple creating these machines out of a single block of aluminum are true too, by the way. The trackpad is made of glass, which Apple says will allow users to employ 40 percent more tracking area, and virtual buttons can be used in order to use right clicking from the mouse pad (Yaay! no more control-click!).

The new MBP will swap out the Intel integrated chip for NVidia’s chips, including BOTH the GeForce 9400M and 9600 GT, allowing for better graphics capability when the user needs it. They can be switched on the fly, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

Apple has also opted to use the Mini Display Port, which is best explained by AppleInsider:

“DisplayPort is a new license-free, royalty-free, digital audio/video interconnect, intended to be used primarily between a computer and its display monitor, or a computer and a home-theater system.”

That would allow the MBP to connect to the new Apple Display, also introduced today for $899.

What the enthusiast sites apparently missed in their guesses was the SSD option, which brings one of the Air’s signature features to the MBP line. This along with the new manufacturing process would also allow Apple to shrink its laptops even further — the new model measures in at .95″ thick.

Here’s the highlights of the specs of each model that we haven’t covered above:

$1999

• 15.4″ widescreen LED-backlit display
• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB RAM, expandable to 4GB;
• 250GB HDD with Sudden Motion Sensor
• 8X SuperDrive
• 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Ethernet
• iSight camera
• two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire® 800 port, ExpressCard card slot
• one audio line in and one audio line out port

$2499

• 15.4″ widescreen LED-backlit display
• 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB RAM
• 320GB HDD with Sudden Motion Sensor
• 8X SuperDrive
• 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Ethernet
• iSight camera
• two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire® 800 port, ExpressCard card slot
• one audio line in and one audio line out port

The new models will begin shipping immediately, with Jobs telling the crowd to expect them at retail on Wednesday.

The MacBook Pro I use most of the time is relatively thin and light given how powerful it is, but it’s no subnotebook. And it’s the largest, heaviest machine I’ve carried in years. I used to be addicted to subnotebooks like the Fujitsu Lifebook B112 and Fujitsu P-1000, but in 2004 I had an epiphany and bought my first Mac in years–the 12-inch PowerBook, which was a bit larger and heavier. Then I replaced that with the even larger, heavier 13-inch MacBook. And when I started Technologizer, I decided I wanted more screen space and resolution, and bought the MacBook Pro.

So for me, the Mini-Note doesn’t feel exotic so much as a return trip to the kind of notebook I used to tote. As netbooks go, it’s not cheap (you can buy a basic Linux-based Asus eee PC for less than half its $829 price) but it’s well-equipped, with stuff like a decently -sized hard drive, 2GB of RAM, Bluetooth, a long-life battery, Gigabit Ethernet, and a large-for-a-netbook keyboard that resists spills (HP aims the Mini-Note at students).

Here’s a T-Grid comparing it to the MacBook Pro configuration I own, which weighs twice as much and costs close to three times the Mini-Note’s price–probably the only time you’ll ever see these radically different computers head to head:

The notebooks	HP Mini-Note	Apple MacBook Pro
Platform	Windows XP	OS X (and Vista and XP when I need them)
Price	$829 (not including available $100 rebate)	$2249
CPU	1.6-GHz Via C7-M	2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM	2GB	4GB
Hard drive	120GB	250GB
Optical drive	None	SuperDrive DVD burner
Screen size, resolution, graphics	8.9-inch; 1280 by 768; Via Chrome 9 integrated	15.4-inch; 1400 by 900; Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT with 256MB of RAM
Size and weight	1.05″h by 10″w by 6.5″d	1″h by 14.1″w by 9.6″d; 5.4 lbs.
Battery life (advertised)	4.5 hours	“5 hours wireless productivity”
Ports	2 USB 2.0; VGA; microphone; headphone	2 USB 2.0; 1 FireWire 400; 1 FireWire 800; Mini-DVI; optical audio in; optical audio out
CommunicTechnologizer › Edit — WordPressations	Gigabit Ethernet; 802.11 a/b/g; Bluetooth	Gigabit Ethernet; 802.11 a/b/g/n; Bluetooth
Touchpad size (diagonal)	2.75″	4.25″

So how has life been with the Mini-Note? A few notes:

Performance: The Mini-Note is, by design, a basic computer, with a basic Via CPU. I’m not sure if I’d want to throw Photoshop at it. But it runs Firefox well enough. I’ve been opening up scads of windows at once–WordPress, Meebo, Polldaddy, Twitter, Picnik, two instances of Gmail and more–and it does seem like it may get a little sluggish at times. But I’m not positive about that and want to spend more time with it before coming to any conclusions.

Input: Like I said, the Mini-Note’s keyboard isn’t too small–it’s only about half an inch narrower than that of the much wider MacBook Pro. I feel like I’m angling my hands in a bit when I type, but I’ll bet I’m just learning to adapt to it, since I was happy for years with small keyboards in the past. The touchpad is really small, but the main issue I’m having with it is that the mouse buttons flank it rather than sitting below it. If I used the Mini-Note permanently, I might do something I usually don’t do with notebooks: invest in an undersized mouse.

Screen size: I’ve definitely grown used to having a reasonably roomy screen like the one on the MacBook Pro. Or maybe my eyeballs have aged more than I realized over the past few years. My biggest issue with the Mini-Note at first was dealing with type size. Then I remembered that Firefox has a feature I almost never use: Zoom. I magnified everything a bit, and am no longer squinting. It’s not a perfect solution–a few sites I use have layouts that don’t quite work–but it’s close enough.

Portability: The Mini-Note is small and light–a laptop you can carry anywhere without giving it much thought. Operation Foxbook hasn’t involved any airplane trips, but this machine would work fine in a coach seat; I sometimes have to angle the MacBook Pro out into the aisle to work on it. (Someday, a flight attendent will whip by with the drink cart and put a dent in it, I’m sure.)

Software: One of the biggest differences between the Mini-Note and the MacBook Pro is their operating systems. But for the purposes of Operation Foxbook, it doesn’t matter much at all. I’m living in Firefox, and it’s nearly identical in both OSes.

The bottom line: Actually, I want more time with Operation Foxbook and the Mini-Note before I come to one. I know I like the Mini-Note for what it is; I also know that there are things about the MacBook Pro that I’ll enjoy having back when the experiment is over.

Stay tuned for more Operation Foxbook updates over the weekend. This isn’t going to be a long-term project–I borrowed the Mini-Note from HP, and need to send it back. But I’ve got more stuff to try, and more thoughts to share, before I wind things up.

Price: I mentioned the Mini-Note isn’t much more than a third the price of the MacBook Pro, right?