Who would've thought a Macbook Pro would be the spotlight of the Macworld conference, instead of desktops? (See our live blog of the event.)

The 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro was rumored to receive the same aluminum brick, glass trackpad, and new Intel CPU treatment--but that was a long shot, to say the least. The biggest story here is the non-removable battery.

Apple claims that a removable battery leaves a lot of "wasted space," so by turning the battery bay into something equivalent to those of the iPods and the iPhone 3G, the 17-inch MBP can accommodate a higher-capacity battery. According to Apple, it will get about 7 to 8 hours on a single charge, depending on which nVidia GPU it uses (It uses the same switching graphics technology as the Apple Macbook Pro 15-inch--dual graphics).

Meanwhile, the new Pro's lusciously thin design and its status as the lightest 17-inch laptop (6.6 pounds) in the world are secured
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There are other things to drool over, too, like the new LED screen. It's not an 18-inch widescreen, and it's not the 16-by-9 form factors that are taking over the media center laptop space. The 17-inch wide sports a 1,920-by-1,200 resolution, with options to go with glare or no-glare.

A no-glare option and the screen's 60-percent-greater color gamut (a sign that it's an RGB LED screen) should be music to a photographer's ears. Of course, there are other laptops that tout a high color gamut on their screens: The Sony VAIO VGN-AW190 claims up to 130% of the Adobe RGB color space and the Lenovo Thinkpad W700 workstation (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329027,00.asp) goes up to 72 percent.

At $2,799, the Macbook Pro 17-inch also features a 2.66-Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, both nVidia GeForce 9400M and 9600M GPUs, and a 320GB hard drive.