Whether it was because Steve Jobs was too ill to deliver this year's keynote or whether there was simply no big news from Apple to report, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, pinch hit for Jobs this year at the annual MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco today and unveiled several decidedly low-key product announcements.

The biggest news for professional photographers -- and perhaps the biggest news of Schiller's keynote -- was the announcement of a new 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop computer which will boast a reported eight hours of battery life on a single charge. The new MacBook Pro, which will be available in a standard configuration for $2,799 (the same price as the previous model), also has a new LED-backlit display offering 1920 x 1200-pixel native resolution, at 133 pixel per inch.

The display has a 60 percent greater color gamut than the previous version with 700:1 contrast ratio designed to produce brighter whites and darker blacks. The new MacBook Pro is also the thinnest and lightest 17-inch notebook computer out there, weighing just 6.6 pounds and only 0.98-inches thick.

The one aspect of the LCD that may peeve photographers is that it ships with a  glossy, not a matte, screen which makes it more susceptible to glare in bright light. There is an "anti-glare" option but that costs $50 extra. Schiller explained that the $50 premium is because Apple engineers must remove the front bezel of the MacBook Pro and build it to order to add the anti-glare option. (Uh....yeah.)

Extended Battery Life But Not Removable
The big news surrounding the 17-inch MacBook Pro though is its extended battery life. According to Schiller, it's three hours longer than on the previous MacBook Pro which represents a 60 percent increase. Batteries in the new computers also last up to five years so fewer will, ostensibly, end up in landfills.

The new MacBook Pro and its battery are also PVC and BFR (brominated flame retardant) free which makes them more environmentally sound and recyclable.

The improved battery life is not without one major caveat though. Like an increasing number of Apple's products -- i.e., the iPhone -- the battery in the new MacBook Pro is not removable by the user. According to Schiller, a removable battery uses "a lot of wasted space" and to make a battery that was 40 percent larger they had to make it non-removable. The only way to take it out would be to take apart the computer. (Uh...right.)

Like the new MacBook computers, the new MacBook Pro is carved from a single block of aluminum to make it slim and streamlined and more durable. Like the  MacBooks, the MBP's trackpad acts as a single button which offers 39 percent more room on the pad's new glass surface. The computer has a 320GB hard drive standard or is upgradeable to a 256GB SSD (solid state drive) option.

It offers up to 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory and the ships standard with the new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics process. Users can also choose the discrete NVIDIA 9600M GT graphics processor option which is faster but the batter life dips to seven hours on a single charge.

Other "News"
In other news, Schiller also announced new versions of several of Apple's consumer software suites -- iLife 09 and iWork 09. The new consumer-oriented iPhoto program in iLife 09 offered a couple of interesting upgrades including a new Faces feature which will identify and tag faces of friends across several platforms including Facebook.

The feature uses Face Detection technology to create a snapshot of the person to identify them later. There's also a new Places feature in iPhoto 09 which organizes photos in a collection via GPS geotagging. If photos don't have a geotag, the users can tag it themselves from an iPhoto database of places and points of interest such as the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower.

Schiller also unveiled an '09 upgrade to Apple's iWork suite of business applications which includes Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. There is also a beta version of the new iWork.com.

Like much of the news in this lackluster, Jobs-less keynote, Schiller's announcements received only sparse applause from the audience of journalists and analysts. As a grand finale -- which was usually Jobs' cue to unveil something exciting -- Schiller announced a new DRM-free version of iTunes called iTunes Plus and said that the iTunes store will now be accessible for wireless purchasing via the iPhone's 3G network. (Ka-thump.)