Apple has announced a new update to its Macbook Pro line today, putting some more heft under the hood. The big change? All of the new Macbooks will be sporting Merom processors.

For those of you who are interested in a (literally) shiny new notebook for the holidays, you'll be happy with the change. The higher-end models now sport the T7400 and T7600 Merom Core 2 Duo processors, so they'll have all the benefits of 4MB of shared cache and speeds up to 2.33GHz. Previous models had only 2x1MB of cache (not shared) and went to 2.16GHz. Apple also tweaked OS X to take better advantage of the Merom chips.

Apple has released some figures, though they should be taken with a grain of salt considering the source. The claim is that the new systems are 39% faster than previous Macbook Pro systems, and up to 7x faster than the G4 PowerPC-based models. Along with the increase in speed, there is a likelihood for better power consumption - Merom is an incredibly efficient processor.

With this change, Apple stand to have a chance at one of the most powerhouse notebooks on the market, at least in raw computational power - a feat that has pretty much never happened. And with the company's notebook sales already being almost double any other manufacturer, it might be a safe bet to expect more of those "cool guy" Mac commercials...

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