Apple released new 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros today. Plenty of upgrades: Santa Rosa chips, 2gigs of ram standard, Geforce 8600M GPUs. The 15″ gets LED backlighting, while the 17″ gets the option for a higher res screen – 1920×1200, the same as the 23″ cinema displays. That’s a really huge feature, both for folks working with video (it means you can view 1080i at 1:1 resolution) and for normal users. Personally, I find the 23″ has just about enough screen realestate to productively multitask, so I’m excited about that many pixels in a laptop.

I’ll be very excited to see LED backlighting in person as well, as it’s supposed to be pretty beautiful. The 15″ also picks up a little extra runtime thanks to the lower power backlighting, so Apple estimates 6 hours of battery life. Nice.