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point given Apple's penchant for coloring lower-end iPods, advance word of the release nonetheless escaped the media, Think Secret sources included.

Aside from the colors, Apple left the iPod shuffle alone, and the music player will continue to sell for $79 in a 1-Gbyte capacity. Whether the new colors will spur sales of the shuffle remains to be seen; the original silver iPod shuffle, which continues to be sold, fared phenomenally well during the holiday quarter, capturing the top spot on Amazon.com's Best Sellers in Electronics and contributing significantly to Apple's total iPod sales.

Apple does not break down iPod sales by model, but the company's staggering quarterly sales of 21 million iPods, a unit increase of 50 percent from the previous year, improved iPod revenue only 18 percent year-over-year, suggesting that many of the iPods sold were towards the low end of the product line. Regardless, the iPod shuffle is a key money maker for Apple, boasting some of the highest profit margins among iPods despite its relatively low $79 price tag, sources say. All told, it's a success story for a product that many had left for dead after nearly two years had passed without an update to the original white "gum pack" iPod shuffle, which debuted in January 2005.

Apple has touted brighter displays with nearly every major revision to its laptops in recent history. In announcing the MacBook last year, the company said the laptop sported a display that was "79 percent brighter" than the 12-inch iBook and PowerBook it replaced, while earlier in the year Apple boasted that the 17-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops featured displays 36 percent and 67 percent brighter than their predecessors, respectively—an improvement that arrived just three months after Apple updated its PowerBook G4 with displays "up to 47 percent brighter" than before. Apple's laptops have consistently sported the brightest displays on the market, an important consideration for customers using multimedia applications.

Sources expect that this trend will continue when the company upgrades its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks later this year. The improved display performance will arrive courtesy of a new generation of LCD that use light emitting diodes (LED) for the display's backlight, as opposed to the cold cathode fluorescent backlights (CCFL) that have long been used in LCD displays.

The benefits of LED backlights are numerous. Aside from the improved brightness, they boast lower power consumption and an even thinner profile than the already-slim CCFL backlights. For Apple, LED backlights enable the company to design even thinner laptops with longer battery life, another area in which Apple has traditionally excelled in compared to its competition. Precise real-world energy savings are hard to peg, but with a laptop's display consuming substantial power, benefits are expected to be noticeable.

At present, only two PC makers offer a laptop that features an LED-backlight display: Sony (a 13.3-inch model) and Fujitsu (an 11.1-inch model that has been available for more than a year in Japan). Virtually every other PC maker is expected to deliver at least one laptop with an LED-backlight display this year as LCD panel makers improve the technology and reduce prices.

The cost of manufacturing a 13.3-inch display with an LED backlight is currently twice that of building one with a CCFL backlight, sources say, and the price premium increases with display size because of the added difficulties of using LEDs with larger panels. Accordingly, it is likely the technology would find its way into the 13.3-inch MacBook or 15.4-inch MacBook Pro before it reaches the 17-inch MacBook Pro or Apple's iMac and Cinema Display product lines.

Sources say Apple already has systems in development with the displays, and that production could begin as soon as later this quarter or, more realistically, some time in the second quarter. Intel is expected to launch a faster Core 2 Duo processor in the second quarter, the 2.4GHz T7700, which might give Apple an added incentive to upgrade its laptops then. The Mac maker's high-end MacBook Pro currently features Intel's 2.33GHz T7600 processor, the fastest available Core 2 Duo chip in Intel's portfolio, and with laptop sales accounting for about 60 percent of Apple's computer sales, keeping its laptops fresh and at the top of the market is of utmost importance to the firm.

Nick DePlume and the ThinkSecret staff cover Apple, the Macintosh, and related software with a mixture of news and other inside information. Check them out at http://www.thinksecret.com.