UPDATE #1: According to Appleinsider the 17 inch MacBook Pro will be up for the new treatment by “early next year”.

UPDATE #2: I didn’t realize that the new trackpads offered on the laptops don’t have a button! They are large and glass and rely on tapping and gestures. At first this scares me for intensive editing or graphics work but if the whole gesture thing can be implemented right in something like Final Cut Pro or Photoshop if could make for some cool new was of working with a timeline. Engadget has a video excerpt from the keynote with a demo of the trackpad’s gestures.

By now most everyone knows that Apple introduced new laptops today, a new monitor and not much else. The pros were somewhat neglected with these new products. First there’s the MacBook Air. It’s not really a production machine so no surprise there. The new MacBook gets faster with better graphics but eliminates its one and only firewire 400 port. A MacBook wasn’t ideal for editing anyway as its a bit underpowered and the screen is small. The new 15 inch MacBook Pro loses its firewire 400 port and will only have one firewire 800 port. The 17 inch MacBook Pro didn’t get the fancy new treatment so that makes me wonder about its future. In fact, if you go to apple.com the 17 inch MacBook is almost impossible to find.

It’s still there in the store and marked as new but it’s certainly not being promoted. So it seems that Apple is targeting the consumer/business market more that the high-end video/graphics professional with these updates. That’s not surprising since Apple has been a much more consumer-product oriented company of late. But to me the really big story is the comment from Steve Jobs that Blu-ray, which still isn’t offered in any production Macintosh is a “bag of hurt.” This article from The Standard says that “posters on professional video forums have complained in the past about Apple’s lack of support for the industry standard in HD physical media, but posters on general entertainment tech forums today seemed indifferent to the lack of Blu-ray drives on the new Macs.” This is absolutely true that video professionals want to be able to offer Blu-ray discs to clients and that we often want push technology along before the consumer world gets on board. Jobs was right in his comments that the licensing is turning out to be a big pain for a lot of content creators but until a big player like Apple gets on board and pushes for changes in the licensing fees then that’s not likely to change. Oh wait, Apple is on the Blu-ray boad. They just don’t seem to care.