When Daily Variety broke the news that Pixar had hired writers for the pitch that became the 2007 release, ‘Ratatouille,’ Steve Jobs tracked the reporter down at the Sundance Film Festival, demanding to know her sources and threatening to fire the film’s writers. He called her on the private line of a rented condo–a number she had not given out to anyone. She still doesn’t know how he found it.”

– Daily Variety, June 18, 2006

Beyond the technology on display at Tuesday’s Apple event, what was perhaps most interesting was the accuracy with which it had been predicted. Astonishing really, given Apple’s near-monomaniacal secrecy. With the exception of that bogus $800 MacBook story, nearly every single rumor voiced in the weeks preceding Tuesday’s event was proven true–Apple’s new “brick” manufacturing process, aluminum enclosures for consumer MacBooks, LED backlit display, multi-touch glass trackpads, the screaming fast new Nvidia GPUs, even the date of the MacBook event itself. So when CEO Steve Jobs took the stage and said, “we have some exciting new products to show you,” most everyone sitting in the audience already had a pretty damn good idea what they were about to be shown. And that’s got to bother Apple (AAPL), which has long argued that leaks dampen excitement around product launches and taken legal action against rumor sites that publish them. Certainly, Jobs, showman that he is, can’t be pleased that the rabbits he’d planned to pull out of his hat Tuesday were hopping willy-nilly about the stage before he even arrived.

But apparently there’s little Apple can do to stop it. Or it’s given up trying. Or something else. “There used to be saying at Apple,” Jobs recalled at our D5 conference: “Isn’t it funny? A ship that leaks from the top.”

Perhaps it’s time for that saying be brought back into popular usage.

Ives describes how excess aluminum left over from the original piece used in manufacturing is recycled throughout the process. The precision aluminum unibody enclosure that Apple used in the MacBook Air, he notes, is now being extended to the rest of the Mac notebook lineup.

Jobs returns to the stage. He explains that chipmaker Nvidia approached Apple (AAPL) about a new graphics chip that could be used in desktops. Apple decided to adopt it for laptops, however. The chip, called GForce 9400M, delivers graphics up to five times faster than Apple’s current graphics chips.

New notebooks will boast a multi-touch glass trackpad. The entire trackpad is the button.

The trackpad supports multifinger gestures, including some new ones. Four-finger gestures can control AMD app-switching.

A full-glass instant-on LED displays all connectors on one side. The notebooks feature next-gen graphics, mini-display port connector and a magnetic latch.

And they’re environmentally responsible. The unibody design, for example, requires only half the number of parts of Apple’s previous notebooks.

Jobs passes a chassis around the audience, and it is, indeed, very slick. “A tour de force of engineering,” says Jobs. Holding one of these in your hands, it’s tough to disagree.

More coming …