There’s a surprising level of awe and wonder in the tech press about the batteries in the MacBook Pro computers that Apple (AAPL) unveiled last week — especially since they’ve been around for more than a year.

“Battery life to die for,” was the headline of a widely quoted review in AnandTech.

“Battery technology simply doesn’t advance this fast,” wrote Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub.

“This kind of battery life is reserved for iPods and mobile phones, not laptops,” gushed Leander Kahney in Wired’s Cult of Mac. “Who cares if the battery is sealed in?”

That last remark is especially surprising given that one of the knocks against the first Apple computer to deploy the new battery technology — the MacBook Air that Steve Jobs introduced in January 2008 — was that its battery couldn’t be replaced with a fresh one if it ran out of juice in mid-flight over the Atlantic.

But the first MacBook Air only promised 5 hours of computer power. Apple claims the new MacBooks will deliver 7 or 8 hours on a single charge and last up to 5 years — longer than the expected life of the average laptop.

AnandTech tested the first claim in a series of benchmarks reproduced below the fold. Bottom line: the new MacBook Pro delivered …

• 8.13 hours of light wireless Web browsing, and
• 4.92 hours of heavy downloading.

According to Anand Lal Shimpi, who ran the tests, he saw 50% to 100% improvement in battery life over the old MacBook Pros — considerably better than the 46% theoretical improvement he expected based on the new battery’s capacity.

His review offers several explanations for the improvement:

• new battery technology (lithium polymer vs. lithium ion)
• new form factor (rectangles vs. cylinders)
• better battery management (adaptive charging that senses the power needs of each cell).

Whether Apple can deliver on its promise of five years of battery life (based on 1,000 recharges vs. 300) remains to be seen. If the battery does need replacing before the computer dies of natural causes, Apple technicians will do the job (and dispose of the old one) for $120 a pop.

You’ll might be able to get an independent technician to do it for less, but probably not without voiding your warranty.

Below the fold: AnandTech’s benchmarks. To view an Apple promotional video about the new batteries, click here.

Battery graphics courtesy of Apple Inc.

In an embarrassment of plaudits, Apple (AAPL) swept all three laptop categories in Consumer Reports‘ latest study of personal computers. The reader survey, published Monday, is the cover story of the magazine’s June issue.

In all, five Apple notebooks made the cut. In one category –13-inch notebooks — Apple won the top three places.

In that category, the 13-inch aluminum MacBook was No. 1, the solid-state MacBook Air No. 2, and the white plastic 13-inch MacBook No. 3.

The 15-inch MacBook came in first in the 14- to 16-inch notebook category.

And the 17- to 18-inch notebook category was taken by the 17-inch MacBook. The 17-inch HP (HPQ) Pavilion made famous by Lauren De Long in the first Microsoft’s (MSFT) Laptop Hunter ad, came in fourth in this category behind Dell (DELL) and Lenovo machines.

Apple also took first place in tech support. Its desktop machines did not fare quite as well. The 20-inch iMac came in second after the Dell XPS One 24 in the standard desktop category. The Mac Mini also made this list.

Below: Consumer Reports’ laptop rankings. (Click to enlarge.)

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the update of Apple’s (AAPL) current Macintosh operating system that Steve Jobs said would ship in “about a year” when he introduced it last June, may not arrive until later this summer or fall.

That’s one of the nuggets of news offered by Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu in a report to clients issued Wednesday.

Among other findings Wu turned up in a check of his sources in Apple’s supply chain and distribution network:

• Mac build plans have increased. Due to stronger-than-expected reception of Apple’s newly introduced Macs, Wu says that the Street’s current estimates of 2.2 – 2.3 million Macs shipped in the March quarter may turn out to be on the low side.
• New products in the works. Commenting on recent speculation about an Apple netbook, Wu says his sources suggest that “several initiatives” are being worked on, including perhaps a smaller MacBook Air or “MacBook mini” (essentially a netbook) and oversized iPod touches.
• The Mac mini is a “sleeper hit.” Wu is seeing “surprisingly positive feedback” on Apple’s cheapest Mac. He would liked to have seen lower prices, but he says the $599 display-and-keyboard-less box is being “warmly received” for its  larger hard drive, faster processor and NVIDIA graphics chip.
• Delayed quad-core iMac. Wu, like many other hardcore Mac users, was hoping for a quad-core iMac, as opposed to the dual-core machine Apple released last week. Now he says it makes more sense for Apple to wait for Snow Leopard, which takes better advantage of the quad core processors, and for lower-power parts from Intel that don’t run quite so hot.

Wu’s track record on Apple hardware predictions is mixed. He correctly predicted the release of new desktop Macs, but he also said that they would be unveiled two months earlier at Macworld, along with a new combination Apple TV/Time Capsule that never materialized. (link)

Apple has yet to respond to our request for comment.

February is going to turn out to have been a dismal month for Mac sales — especially compared with last year — says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. But they should bounce back a bit in March, he adds.

The data on which Munster bases his predictions — domestic sales estimates made by the NPD Group — won’t be released until next Monday, March 16. But that didn’t stop Munster from posting the numbers shown in the chart above. (The last two data points are his estimates.)

“We expect Mac NPD to bottom out at around -12% y/y [year over year] in the month of Feb-09,” he writes in a report to clients issued Tuesday. He cites two key factors:

• A tough comparison with February 2008, when unit sales got a bump from the new Macbook Air, which went on sale that month.
• A slowdown in Mac sales from customers anticipating the release of new machines — the iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Pros introduced March 3.

March should look a little better for Apple thanks to sales of those new machines, says Munster. He expects NPD data to be flat for the month, which would leave Mac sales for Apple’s second fiscal quarter down 6% — the first quarter of negative Mac sales growth since at least 2005.

The chart above shows both how strong Mac sales were at the start of 2008 and how much they have slowed with the onset of the recession.

The good news, according to Munster, is that the worst may be over. He expects “positive sentiment” to build after the February trough and push share prices up over the next several weeks.

Piper Jaffray’s target for Apple (AAPL) is $180 per share. The stock closed Tuesday at $88.63 — up 6.64% for the day.

How secure is your smartphone? We may find out next month.

Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s (GOOG) Android, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian operating systems.

The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s (COMS) TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones and “pwn” it — hacker and Internet-gamer slang meaning to conquer or gain ownership. The smartphones themselves will be awarded as prizes to whomever cracks them first.

Under the rules of the contest, the organizers will reduce the difficulty each day that the smartphones are able fend off the attacks. The first day the phones with be “raw metal,” with no applications installed, forcing contestants to use Wi-Fi or network exploits. On the second day, the rules will be relaxed to allow the applications that come installed with the phones, including e-mail and Web browsers, but no third-party apps or downloads.

A second Pwn2Own contest track will pit hackers against browsers, with $5,000 prizes for contestants who can break the security of one of these five Web browser configurations: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox or Chrome installed on a Sony (SNE) Vaio running Windows 7 as well as Safari or Firefox installed on a Macbook running Mac OS X.

The prizes are awarded on a “per bug” basis. If more than five people win prizes, TippingPoint will award additional $5,000 bonus prizes for Most Interesting Browser flaw, Most Interesting Mobile Device Flaw, and Best in Show.

The Pwn2Own contest is run in conjunction with the annual CanSecWest security conference, now in its 10th year. The contest made headlines in the Apple press last year when Charlie Miller, a former National Security Agency employee, broke into a MacBook Air in less than two minutes under the second day’s relaxed rules, which permitted him to direct the laptop to a website preloaded with an exploit code. See here.

When it’s not running contests, TippingPoint operates a so-called ZeroDay Initiative in which it pays computer security specialists — also known as “white hat hackers” — a bounty for previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in return for a promise not to exploit them.

TippingPoint, in turn, notifies the vendor and simultaneously develops a patch that it offers to its security clients. Once the vendor has developed its own patch, TippingPoint and the vendor coordinate public disclosure. The researcher can either be given credit for the discovery or, if he or she prefers, remain anonymous.

Pwn2Own 2009 runs from March 18-20. The rules and prizes are posted here.

January was a slow month for Apple (AAPL) — even slower than Wall Street thought it was going to be.

Mac unit sales were down 6% compared with last January, according to NPD data released Tuesday. iPod sales fared even worse, down 14% year to year.

The Street was expecting Mac sales to be off by only 4% and iPod sales off 11%, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.

In a report to clients issued Tuesday afternoon, Munster estimated that Mac sales for the March quarter (Apple’s second fiscal quarter) will be somewhere between 2 and 2.2 million units. iPod sales should come in around 9 to 10 million units.

Putting an optimistic spin on the data, as he is wont to do, Munster saw the Mac numbers as “a neutral or slight positive” given the general uncertainty about the whole economy this quarter.

But, he adds, February and March could be “a tough comparison” for the Macintosh, because Mac sales last February were bolstered by the launch of the MacBook Air. There is no comparable MacBook launch expected this February.

Munster also found something to cheer about in the iPod numbers, even though he now expects unit sales to fall 6% to 15%  by the end of the quarter. “Given concerns regarding iPod  weakness,” he writes, “we believe the segment’s in-line performance relative to  Street expectations is a positive.” He was also pleased by the average price for iPods in January, which was up 4%. He had expected it to fall 3%.

Acknowledging that it’s difficult to extrapolate iPod sales prices from one month of NPD data, Munster thinks they may have risen because the contribution of higher-priced iPod touches in the mix “may exceed our expectations in the Mar quarter.”

Munster maintains a buy rating on Apple shares with a target of $180, one of the highest in the business. The stock closed Tuesday at $94.53, down 4.67% for the day.

What’s up with the MacBook Air?

The road warrior’s favorite Apple (AAPL) notebook, pulled with great fanfare from an interoffice envelope by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2008, is being steeply discounted this weekend, on the eve of Macworld 2009.

The entry level machine (1.6 GHz, 2GB) is still listed on the Apple Store at its original price — albeit with a 50% larger hard drive and a new graphics chipset. But if you act quickly, you can get it for a lot less.

A quick Sunday-morning survey turned up a wide range of prices:

• Apple Store (120 GB hard drive): $1,799.00
• Amazon (120 GB): $1,739.99
• MacMall* (120 GB): $1739.99
• MacMall* (80 GB): $1,149.99
• Apple Store (80 GB refurbished): $1,149.00

*Note that MacMall — which tosses in a free Epson printer, a free USB hub, free Parallels, free Toast and free shipping — has scheduled its sale to end Monday at 11:59 p.m. PST, nine hours before the start of Phil Schiller’s Macworld keynote.

Could Schiller have a MacBook Air upgrade up his sleeve?

Japan continues to be “our most challenging major market,” Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told analysts last month during the company’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings conference call.

That may be, but one of the numbers that jumps out of the Form 10-K that the company filed with the SEC on Wednesday is 39% — the percentage Apple’s net sales grew in Japan last year.

What makes that number remarkable is that it follows an 11% drop in net sales the year before.

Why the turnaround? According to the 10-K report, it was driven by sales of iPods, iMacs, MacBooks and “strong sales from the iTunes Store.” The report singles out Mac net sales and unit sales, which grew 42% and 20%, respectively.

Apple (AAPL) attributes the declines between 2006 and 2007 to general shrinkage in Japan’s consumer PC market and lower average selling prices of iPods.

The MacBook and MacBook Air contributed to the increase in net sales in fiscal 2008, as did strong demand for the iPod touch and iPod nanos at higher average selling prices.

Here are the numbers Apple provides:

The report does not mention sales of the iPhone in Japan, which after the initial excitement this summer are said to have slowed. See here.

According to the 10-K, “The company is continuing to evaluate ways to improve the future results of its Japanese segment.”

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.