Apple signals major MacBook Air-inspired 15-inch MacBook Pro design at Apple Town Hall

For the first time, Apple has brought out a design engineer, Jony Ive, to talk publicly about how current notebooks are built. In diagrams, he showed MacBook Pro's magnesium die-cast core.

He's speaking about lessons learned from MacBook Air. There's no product as thin, yet as strong and robust, as MacBook Air. Instead of starting with a thin piece of aluminum, start with thick extruded aluminum core and dig out room for components. During manufacture, Apple continuously recycles. MacBook Air stars with an aluminum slab weighing 2.5 pounds, ends up machining down to 0.25 pound.

Apple is moving to Nvidia for notebook chip set. GeForce 9400M. 54 gigaflops of graphics. Five times faster than Intel integrated graphics, about 54-80 percent.

Glass trackpad. 39 percent larger tracking area. Removed the button. Multi-buttons via software. New four-finger gestures for Expose and app switching.

New MacBook Pro.

Here come the details.