As recently predicted by Rumors, Apple has updated the remainder of its laptop line-up following last month’s introduction of the Macbook Air.

Sporting powerful “Penryn” 45-nanometer mobile Core 2 Duo processors from 2.1 to 2.6GHz, these new laptops are poised to crush the competition and expand Apple’s market share considerably. Read on for specs, analysis and more details!

Both the Macbooks and MBP’s have received significant enclosure/industrial design tweaks — notably, both sport the same “modern raised-button” keyboard design as the Macbook Air and Apple’s latest stand-alone ‘board.

Most of the new laptops are build around the “standard” Penryn chip, running at 2.1-2.4GHz with 3MB of enhanced on-chip cache memory; as Rumors reported previously in this article about Penryn & future Macbook Air specs, this new cache is faster and more intelligent than previous Merom/Santa Rosa based designs which included 4MB of cache.

Although 25% less cache memory size may seem like a downside, this is actually part of what makes these new 45nm Penryn chips so remarkably efficient.

Higher-end Macbook Pro models at 2.5 and 2.6GHz sport 6MB of this highly optimized cache memory, rocketing them to levels of performance never before seen in the laptop space.

These chips are part of the mobile “Core 2 Extreme” family, and along with optimized cache memory sport numerous architectural and power-saving tweaks that eke out considerably more performance than the mere 100-200MHz difference over the 2.4GHz models would suggest; sources predict that the 2.6GHz model (X9000 series) will perform upwards of 25% faster than the 2.4GHz (T8300) in most operations.

All variants of the new laptops include essentially the same motherboard chipset (“Apple-Customized Santa Rosa Refresh v1a and v1b” in the Macbooks and Macbook Pro respectively), with an 800MHz Front Side Bus and DDR2-667 memory controller.