“Woke up this morning and what’d I see? A mobile landing pad for Leopard in plenty of time for Macworld Expo,” Tom Yager blogs for InfoWorld.

Yager writes, “Apple is now shipping its new Core 2 Duo-equipped 15-inch Core Duo MacBook Pro, with the 17-inch MacBook Pro notebook going out in about a week. These 64-bit notebooks offer a few, yet important advantages over their Core Duo predecessors:”

• First 64-bit Mac notebooks
• First Apple notebooks based on Intel’s 64-bit Core microarchitecture; Core Duo was dual core, 32-bit Pentium-M
• Apple claims performance improvements of 39 percent over Core Duo MacBook Pros
• Dual-layer SuperDrive DVD burner in all models (6X on 15-inch, 8X in 17-inch model)
• 400 and 800 Mbps FireWire ports throughout lineup
• Expandable up to 3 GB of memory (see below)
• Hard drive capacity of up to 200 GB
• Build-to-order options now include MagSafe airline power adapter (see below)

Yager reports, “Apple’s approach to expanding MacBook Pro’s RAM is to factor in availability of 2 GB DDR2 SODIMM memory. These are still 2-socket systems. To get to 3 GB, you put a 2 GB DIMM in one slot and a 1 GB DIMM in the other.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Is Steve Jobs planning a “January Surprise?” We can hear the keynote now, “One more thing… We’re releasing Leopard today.” Or maybe not. What do you think?

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