When Steve Jobs concluded his Macworld keynote this year, he reviewed the products Apple had announced so far in 2008: new Mac Pros, Time Capsule, software updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch, iTunes movie rentals, a revamped Apple TV and, of course, the MacBook Air. He commented: "All of this in the first two weeks. And we got 50 more weeks to go," implying that Apple have a good deal more up their sleeves for the rest of 2008. This month seems to bear out his optimism, with the announcement of new MacBook and MacBook Pro models, along with the long-awaited iPhone software development kit (SDK).

Following in the footsteps of the Mac Pro line, which Apple updated at the beginning of the year to make use of Intel's latest Xeon processors, the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro models now also feature Penryn-based processors. As you may remember from February's Apple Notes column, Penryn is the latest revision of the Core micro-architecture, offering a number of performance improvements and additional SSE instructions.

The MacBook is now available with either a 2.1 or 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, both of which feature a 3MB Level 2 cache on an 800MHz system bus. Although it might seem strange that the amount of Level 2 cache has been reduced by a megabyte compared to the previous model, this isn't really a step backwards in performance terms, since the Core micro-architecture now makes more efficient use of the cache than before.

Other than the new generation of processor, which is a big deal, there are only modest improvements to memory and onboard storage, and the...