The new MacBooks are hot — and we're not talking about the lap-scorching temperature of their aluminum unibodies.

Apple's (AAPL) online store is currently showing a 7- to 10-day delay in shipping two models of the MacBook Pro — the high-end ($1,500) 13-inch and the entry-level ($1,700) 15-inch.

According to Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, who tracks product lead times, Apple has never had a 7-10-day delay in the 13-inch MacBook — the one recently re-named the MacBook Pro. The most significant delay he's seen was a record 5-7 days, set more than two years ago.

In addition to the shipping delays, he says, some Apple retail stores are experiencing shortages of selected 13-inch MacBook Pros. Of the 10 stores his team contacted, seven were sold out of at least one 13-inch model.

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According to Morgan Stanley's Kathryn Huberty, Apple (AAPL) is the computer maker with the "most upside" as the PC market begins to stabilize after the dismal first quarter of 2009.

There's some good news for Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) in the report to clients Huberty issued overnight Wednesday, but it's mostly attributed to enterprise cycles and inventory restocking.

Apple, however, is a different story.

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For those who couldn't make it to San Francisco Monday — or who couldn't get into the event (it sold out in record time) — Apple (AAPL) has posted a 2-hour streaming video of the entire keynote. Click here to watch it.

If you want to learn more about the iPhone 3G S without watching the video, the same link offers a 13-minute guided tour that can be played on a computer or an iPod. It also offers links to videos about Snow Leopard and the new MacBook Pros.

See also:

• Live from Apple WWDC 2009: New iPhone, new MacBooks, no Steve Jobs
• Analyst: The $99 iPhone will increase sales twofold

Apple's (AAPL) last Macworld Conference and Expo opens Monday at San Francisco's Moscone Center, but the real action starts Tuesday at 9 a.m. PT (12 noon ET) with senior vice president Phil Schiller's opening remarks — the first Macworld keynote not delivered by Steve Jobs since 1997.

Nobody's expecting breakthrough products that rise to the level of the iMac (Macworld 1998), the iBook (1999), iTunes (2001) or the iPhone (2007), but this Expo is not without its drama, speculation and hype.

Our top 10 favorite Macworld rumors:

10. Snow Leopard release date. We know a lot about Mac OS X 10.6, thanks to Jobs' June 2008 announcement that it was coming, Apple's official description of the product and a steady stream of leaks from the developer community. What we don't know is when it will ship.

9. Unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro. By several accounts, this machine was supposed to be released in October, along with the new unibody 13-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro. But display issues and problems with the optical drive reportedly pushed its release back "several months" — which brings us to next week's Expo. UPDATE: Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac adds this twist: the new 17-inch Pro will sport a superslim longer-lasting nonremovable battery pack.

8. Revamped iWork. The big news on New Year's Eve was the "truckload" of information dumped on various rumor sites about iWork — Apple's homegrown answer to Microsoft (MSFT) Office.  The thrust of it was that what's now a suite of desktop applications — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — is about to be transformed into a collection of Web-based apps like the .Mac Web Gallery, suitable for cloud computing.

7. 32 GB iPhone. Whispers that Apple was set to double the memory of the top-end iPhone have been floating around since September, but AT&T's (T) post-Christmas $99 iPhone sale and word that Apple had sewed up the lion's share Samsung's flash memory production all point to a January release.

6. 64 GB iPod touch. Rumors of this memory upgrade go back even further. It was supposed to happen in August, then in September, and then before Christmas. With memory prices falling, time is more than ripe.

5. New Mac mini. Rumors of the most affordable Mac's imminent demise have given way to a flood of new specs, among them  2.0 or 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo processors, NVIDIA graphics platform, dual display outputs and dual drives that can be configured every which way.

4. New iMac. Some inspired sleuthing in the extension files that shipped with the new MacBooks found references to NVIDIA chipsets for both a Mac mini and a new iMac — along with hints that the reconfigured all-in-one desktop was supposed to ship in November but got pushed into 2009 by unexpected delays. DigiTimes now reports that Apple has ordered shipments of 800,000 per month.

3. New iPod shuffle. FBR Capital Markets' Craig Berger, whose track record AppleInsider describes as "questionable," expects Apple to release a new and smaller version of the iPod shuffle sometime in the first calendar quarter — which started on Thursday. AppleInsider adds that it has picked up chatter of a new shuffle that would be flat as a credit card but thick enough at one end to fit a headphone jack.

2. New Apple TV/Time Capsule. This one also comes from an analyst. Shaw Wu, a veteran Apple watcher newly ensconsed at Kaufman Bros., wrote last week about the possibility that Apple will introduce a new consumer device — "an enhanced version of Apple TV and/or Time Capsule" — that would give users access to their media content, SlingBox style, from anywhere on the Internet.

1. Steve Jobs. Show or no-show, Apple's CEO is both Macworld 2009's No. 1 rumor and the No. 1 source of rumors — whether it be that he's stepping down, that his health is failing, that he doesn't feel there's enough news in Nos. 1-9 to justify a Steve Jobs keynote, or that he just doesn't feel like playing in Macworld's sandbox anymore. We favor the theory that he's set the stage brilliantly for a surprise cameo appearance. Er, UPDATE: See What's going on with Steve Jobs' homones?

Below the line:

• iPhone nano. Despite all the chatter — and spy photos — not this Macworld. Maybe later this year.
• iPod tablet. Maybe later this year. Maybe never.

Is there truth to any of this? We'll be flying to San Francisco Monday to find out. Tune in to this space early Tuesday for our Macworld 2009 live blog.

[Photo courtesy of setteB.IT.]

Below the fold: How Phil Schiller could hit a home run next Tuesday, as imagined on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board by one of the regulars, retired Air Force pilot Pat Smellie.

UPDATE: In case you haven't heard, almost none of this came true on Tuesday. By my count, the rumor mill is batting less than 150. See Live from Apple's last Macworld!

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Blame Duncan Riley.

Last Wednesday, he posted an "exclusive"  on his blog — The Inquisitr — under the headline: "Apple to launch $800 laptop." Although his scoop was unsourced, the news that Apple was set to announce its cheapest notebook computer ever was picked up by Apple blogs and mainstream publications around the world — including the New York Times. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi even published a spreadsheet calculating how much an $800 laptop would increase Apple's available market.

So when Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's new line of laptops on Tuesday with starting prices of $1,299 for the MacBook, $1,799 for the MacBook Air and $1,999 for the MacBook Pro, you could almost hear the sound of Apple's (AAPL) shares falling.

What this means is that Apple is not — with one exception — lowering prices in order to grow its market share. In fact, it raised the base price of the MacBook $200. Steve Jobs is clearly sticking with the strategy that has worked for the company since he came back to Apple in 1997: building high-end, high-margin computers and selling them at a premium to discriminating users.

The one exception is the original white MacBook — the best-selling MacBook ever, according to Jobs — which sold for $1,099 when it was introduced two years ago and will now sell for $999.

What you don't get with the white MacBook, however, are the new features introduced on the redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro:

• Unibody aluminum frames (aka "the Brick")
• LED-backlit glossy displays
• New graphics chipsets offering a 3X-to-6X performance boost
• Button-less multi-touch glass trackpads
• Longer (5 hour) battery life

Except for the pricing, almost none of this was a surprise, given that the specs had been largely nosed out by rumor websites days — if not weeks — in advance. Even the pricing — and the fact that the $800 rumor was wrong — had been leaked a few hours before the event, perhaps to lower expectations on the Street.

If so, it was in vain. Apple's share price, which had gained a record-breaking 13% on Monday and opened higher Tuesday morning, was down more than 5% by the time Jobs finished his presentation and gone to the Q&A. (In fairness, so were most of the other tech stocks.)

"Apple is very good at pricing," says Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group, who believes Apple was right to hold the prices of the new MacBooks steady. "They haven't run out of headroom yet. I expect they will eventually find a way to build out a line that will come in at $799, but they’ll do it in their own way and at their own pace."

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster points out that it's unlike Apple to continue sales of an older model at a reduced price, but considers the move "prudent" given investor sentiment about companies that target high-end consumers, as Apple does.

"We believe the company is positioning its Mac lineup for an extended macroeconomic slowdown," Munster wrote in a report to clients issued after the Apple event. He added, however, that having seen the machines first hand, he thinks the improvements are significant enough to drive buyers up to the $1,299 price-point. "Of the MacBook buyers who would have considered the $1,099 version, we believe more than half will opt for the more expensive $1,299 version instead of the $999 option."

See here for my colleague Jon Fortt's live blog of the event.

UPDATE: Apple has made Tuesday's presentation available as a QuickTime movie. Click here to watch it.

[Photo courtesy of Engadget.]

With only hours to go before Apple (AAPL) unveils its new lineup of MacBooks, the rumor sites have been working overtime, trying to make sense of blurry spy photos and purloined price lists.

But on Tuesday morning, Daring Fireball's John Gruber — a blogger with particularly good sources in Cupertino — cut through the fog and offered some clarity.

According to Gruber's remarkably detailed report:

• The photo here of a MacBook Pro, which surfaced Monday night at Engadget, is the real deal. It shows a black keyboard encased in a single-piece, latch-free aluminum frame.
• There is no $800 or $899 MacBook, as widely rumored. The only Apple notebook computer that will retail for less than $1,000 is the old white 2.1 GHz MacBook, which is getting a price cut from $1,099 to $999.
• The new MacBook Pros come at two price points: $1,999 (2.4 GHz) and $2,499 (2.53 GHz)
• The new MacBooks look like 13-inch versions of the MacBook Pro and come in two configurations: $1,299 (2.0 GHz, 2 GB memory, 160 GB disk) and $1,499 (2.4 GHz, 2 GB memory, 250 GB disk)
• The new machines have no separate trackpad button. The glass trackpad is itself a button. "You just press and it clicks," writes Gruber. "Sounds odd, but I hear it's very cool in practice."
• The new machines are powered by Intel CPUs, but replace the Intel graphics chipsets with a new NVIDIA 9400M GPU (and, in the case of the MacBook Pro, a second NVIDIA 9600M GT). These chipsets can be used to drive an external monitor, including a new $899 24-inch Apple LED display that will also be introduced Tuesday.
• The MacBook Air remains largely unchanged, but with larger hard drives: a 120 GB disk in the low-end model, and a 128 GB solid-state drive in the high-end model.

"Keep your eyes peeled," warns Gruber, "for jackassery in post-event news coverage, much of which, I predict, will focus on the fact that none of these new machines sell for under $1299. The reality is that these new machines are all steps up, but the rumors that caught the most attention in the past week were the ones regarding $799 and $899 laptops. None of these “$800 new MacBook!” rumors came from anyone with any credibility, but that won’t stop some people from holding it against Apple that they didn’t pan out."

You can read Gruber's full report here. He offers no explanation for where he got his information, but given the tenor of his final comments we wouldn't be surprised if the specs were deliberately leaked to lower expectations that had gotten wildly out of control.

Apple is scheduled to unveil the new MacBook lineup at a special event on its Cupertino campus at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT).

In a report to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster added some meat to the bare-bones invitation Apple sent out a couple hours earlier. (See here and here.)

The most important news, according to Munster, is that Apple for the first time since it discontinued the iBook will be offering its premium notebook computers below the psychologically-important $1,000 barrier. Specifically:

• Higher quality, lower-priced MacBooks. Munster expects the new MacBooks, which currently sell for $1,099 and come in black or white, to be clad in a new aluminum casing with a gesture-based touchpad and to sell for $899 to $999. "In other words, we expect the new MacBooks to be a meaningful upgrade with an [average sales price] 9% to 18% lower."
• New MacBook Pros. Munster also expects Apple to introduce redesigned MacBook Pros at the same or slightly lower price. The current MacBook Pro design was introduced almost 3 years ago at $1,999. The new machines, he writes, will likely be thinner and include a more-sophisticated, gesture-based trackpad. He estimates they will start at $1,899.
• New MacBook Airs. Munster expects Apple to introduce new MacBook Airs with updated specs, but doesn't offer any further detail.
• No Tablet Mac. "While we are confident that Apple will eventually bring its touchscreen technology from the iPhone to the Mac," he writes, "we do not expect to see a touchscreen Mac this year."

Piper Jaffray is sticking with its target price of $250 a share. In midday trading Thursday, Apple (AAPL) was up 3% to just over $92.

"I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer," Steve Jobs told Fortune 18 years ago, describing the 40,000-square-foot plant he had constructed in Fremont, Calif., to manufacture circuit boards for his ill-fated NeXT, the $10,000 workstation into which Jobs poured his heart and soul after he was forced out of Apple (AAPL) in 1985.

The factory, as Jobs described it, had everything: robots, lasers, tolerances within one 10,000th of an inch, defect rates of less that 17 parts per million — one tenth the rest of the industry's — and the speed to turn out 60 machines a day. (link)

Now, according to a pair of reports in 9 to 5 Mac and Computerworld Blogs, Jobs has built that plant's successor: a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility that is already turning out the new line of MacBook and MacBook Pros that Apple is expected to introduce on Oct. 14.

This factory, according to Seth Weintraub, a tech reporter with good sources within Apple and a knack for correctly predicting the company's next moves, is the answer to a question that has been haunting Apple watchers for the past month: What is "the Brick"?

The Brick, Weintraub says, is not a new Apple TV, a table-sized Mac, a wireless USB hub, a Windows-smashing software breakthrough — or any of the other ideas put forward in the month of fevered speculation since Weintraub's 9-to-5 colleague Cleve Nettles first posed the question. (See Anatomy of an Apple rumor: "The Brick".)

What the Brick really is, according to Weintraub's sources, is a block of high-quality, aircraft grade aluminum out of which Apple's new laptops will be carved using robot-controlled lasers and high-powered jets of water in Jobs' new factory.

"It is totally revolutionary, a game changer," writes Weintraub. "One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade." (link)

It may also be the answer to another mystery that has bedeviled Apple watchers — the innovation that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, speaking at the last quarterly earnings conference call, warned analysts would cut deeply into Apple's near term operating margins but result in something that "Apple's competitors won't be able to match" for years to come. (See Apple teases with mysterious "product transition".)

Weintraub paints a picture, drawn heavily from a long piece in The Mac Observer by John Martellaro, a former NASA engineer and Apple manager, of a nonpolluting, energy-efficient, wind- or solar-power plant, built in the United States, that would free Apple of its dependence on Chinese manufacturers (and unpleasant Chinese labor conditions) and fulfill Steve Jobs' long-held dream of moving Apple both up and down the value chain — building a legacy at Apple that could survive and prosper long after he is gone.

"An Apple factory (or two), in the right place," writes Marellaro, "costing several billions would be a worthy endeavor for Apple and its cash. It would achieve the grandest goals for Apple's technical future, make a contribution to the planet and its people's well being and help insure Apple's financial and political security." (link)

Marellaro concludes on a wistful note: "But, sigh, it's just an idea"

We'll find out soon enough how much of it is true.

With this year's iPhone and iPod updates behind them, Apple watchers have shifted their attention to the products that matter most to the company's bottom line: the MacBook and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs likes to refer to the Mac as one of the three legs of Apple's stool (the iPod and iPhone being the other two). But that makes for a pretty tippy stool; Macs represent more than 48% of Apple's quarterly revenue these days and MacBooks account for 62% of that.

Sales of Apple's laptops have been on fire lately (no overheating pun intended). On Wednesday, NPD reported that Apple's (AAPL) share of the North American notebook market grew from 6.6% to 10.6% over the past year — a 60% increase that easily outpaced market leaders Dell (DELL; up 1.4%), HP (HPQ; up 0.9%) and Acer (down 22.6%). And although Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster predicts that when Apple reports its fourth quarter earnings in October, Mac sales will have grown only 30% year over year — down from 55% in Q3 — that's still something like 2.9 million machines sold in three months at Apple's fat profit margins.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Apple has waited so long to spruce up its notebook line — the laptop-scorching MacBook Pro, in particular. As Seth Weintraub points out at Computerworld.com, the look and feel of the MacBook Pro is essentially unchanged from the titanium Powerbook that Steve Jobs introduced at Macworld 2003 — a couple of lifetimes ago in computer terms.

Well that's all supposed to change on Oct. 14, when the long-awaited revamped notebooks are due to be introduced, according to sources said to be familiar with Apple's plans. What will they look like? To jump start the conversation, Weintraub on Wednesday posted his wish-list of features, among them:

• An one-piece aluminum frame with a rounder, skinnier shape (a la MacBook Air)
• A high-res 16-inch LED backlit screen
• Built-in 3G wireless technology, perhaps even WMAX
• A multi-touch glass trackpad
• HD video out
• Built-in GPS (for what purpose is not clear)
• Blu-Ray disk drive (this he's not so sure about, since it might cut into iTunes Store sales)
• Solid-state disk drive optional
• HD camera
• All at the current price points ($1099 for the MacBook, $1999 for the MacBook Pro) (link)

That's almost certainly too much to ask for, but a guy can dream, can't he?

Images purporting to be photos of the new machines have already started to appear on the Web. The one at right showed up earlier this week on a German T-Mobile website, but the consensus seems to be that it's a fake. If history is any guide, however, we should be seeing fuzzy spy shots of the real thing any day now.

None of this is set in stone — especially as long as Steve Jobs retains the prerogative to change his mind at the last minute — but AppleInsider has posted the most definitive road map to date of Apple's (AAPL) fall product lineup.

Citing unnamed "people familiar with the situation," AppleInsider's Kasper Jade ticks off a schedule of release for a batch of new iPods, overhauled notebooks and refreshed iMacs, confirming several rumors that have been floating around for weeks and adding a few of his own.

Taken alone, none of these announcements sound quite big enough to account for the sharp drop in the company's gross margins — from 34.1% to 31.5% — CFO Peter Oppenheimer warned analysts to expect this quarter, citing a mysterious "future product transition." But together, they might do the trick.

Here they are, in the order Jade expects them to be released:

• New iPods in September. Digg founder Kevin Rose, an Apple watcher with a track record considerably more checkered than Jade's, predicted last Friday that Apple would soon revamp its entire iPod line, cutting prices sharply, making cosmetic changes to the iPod touch and introducing a significantly redesigned iPod nano with a long thin screen (link). Over the weekend Rose specified a date on which all this would occur: September 9 (link). Without endorsing that particular Tuesday as the date, Jade's sources confirm that Steve Jobs himself will headline a special event tentatively scheduled for the second week of September in which "cheaper and slightly modified iPod touches players and new iPod nanos and related service announcements are expected to take center stage." (link) One thing that will not be announced at that event, according to Jade's sources, is the long-rumored Newton-like handheld multi-touch device.
• New MacBooks and MacBook Pros in September or October. Jade's sources are cagey about the timing here, but they were explicit in saying that new versions of Apple's hot-selling notebook computers would not be available until some time after the new iPods are introduced. Whether that means they are announced at a separate event — perhaps in October — or whether they will be announced at the same event and shipped some weeks later is one of those mysteries that may not get cleared up until the event actually occurs. Among the changes expected: a MacBook clad in aluminum (like the Pro) rather than plastic; tapering around the edges (a la MacBook Air) to produce a slimming effect; a mysterious new chipset (but still with an Intel (INTC) CPU); and a newly designed battery cover and latch that offer easier access to the hard drive.
• Refreshed 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs in November. This is a brand new rumor, rather than a rumor confirming old rumors. According to Jade:
  • "People familiar with these plans have described the refresh to consist of 'speed bumps' rather than major internal or external changes. Based on the roadmap presented to AppleInsider, these systems would debut later this fall following the release of the new MacBooks, making their way to market with little fanfare."

Not expected before the end of the year are refreshes of the Mac Pro or the Mac mini, although Jade's sources report that the latter, once given up for dead, is getting a "major overhaul — the most significant in the mini's short history."

[Timeline and photos courtesy of AppleInsider.]