Apple bumped its MacBooks' Speed, RAM and Hard Drive Capacity--MacBook Pros next?

Apple's MacBooks now come with faster Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs at 2.0GHz and 2.16GHz, 1GB of RAM and hard disk drive capacities of 80, 120 and 160GB. The drives rotate at 5400RPM. The prices remain the same at $1099, $1299 and $1499.

"The MacBook is a huge hit with customers, and is one of the reasons that Mac sales are growing three times faster than PC sales," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new MacBook is faster, has even more memory and storage, and is an ideal notebook for customers' growing library of digital music, photos and movies."

Hopefully, the MacBook release portends that new MacBook Pros with LED backlit screens and Santa Rosa model Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs that address large amounts of flash RAM with speeds up to 2.4GHz will be coming out shortly. A rumored ultraportable MacBook Pro would also be nice! [Bill Fox]