17” unibody MacBook Pro announced

This morning during his MacWorld 2009 keynote, Phil Schiller announced the new 17” MacBook Pro. The notebook is the world’s thinnest 17-inch notebook, at just 0.98 inches thin, and weighs in at 6.6 pounds. It’s got the same LED backlit display with a 1920x1200 resolution, 700:1 contrast ratio, and 60% greater color gamut. It’s got the glossy screen, but on this model there is a $50 anti-glare option that can get built-in behind the glass. As far as connections go, it’s got 3 USB ports, FireWire 800, Mini DisplayPort, ExpressCard, gigabit ethernet, and digital audio in/out. The notebooks rock the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz processor with 6MB L2 Cache, and support up to 8GB of memory. It’s got the two integrated NVIDIA 9400M and 9600M graphics cards, and ships with a 320 GB hard drive, which can be upgraded to a 256 GB SSD. The big news here, though, is the battery life. Sine the battery is non-removeable, Apple was able to cram a bunch of cells into this thing, with the end result being 8 hours of battery life on a single charge using integrated graphics, or 7 hours using the discrete graphics chip.

The new 17” MacBook Pro comes in one configuration and sells for $2799, so no price increase over the last model. That gets you 4GB 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM, a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and a 320 GB hard drive, and it ships in late January.