Will Apple unveil a new line of MacBook Pros today? Some signs point to the possibility the Cupertino, Calif. may announce new laptops with faster chips to coincide with this week’s Macworld Expo 2010.

The first tea leaf isa French gadget blog which quotes an anonymous source. The source “who works for Apple just tell me that the new MacBook Pro line will be launched tomorrow,” according to blogger Steve Hemmerstoffer. The MacBook Pro, which has not seen a major change since last June, could receive faster Intel chips.

Perhaps in a bid to become the world’s leading iCollege, Abilene Christian University will publish an edition of the school paper designed for iPad.

The Texas institution — where the IT studies department was rechristened iSchool — started equipping freshmen with iPhones and iPod Touches back in 2008. The iSchool also started prepping iPhone devs of the future with a 2009 programming course.

Since 2007, they’ve also published the twice-weekly school paper dubbed “The Optimist” (a commentary on future journalists?) for the iPhone.

“The faculty as a whole and the department discussed it, and we said we have to do this,” Dr. Cheryl Bacon,  chairwoman of the department of journalism and mass communications told The Daily Orange. “It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up.”

The best thing about Macworld was always the parties. MacWeek’s annual Mac The Knife Party was a drunken bacchanal for the ages; Peachpit and O’Reily put on nice literary soirees with cash bars; and Microsoft’s events always had fancy hors d’oeuvres.

Even Apple, a stranger to shows of public hospitality, once threw parties with generous helpings of food and booze. I got so ploughed at one event, I forgot my heavy laptop bag — computer, camera and all. Apple designer Jonny Ive kindly picked it up and lugged it about all evening until we ran into each other later at a nightclub, and he handed it back.

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!

But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

• The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
• For the first time since the eighties, it now includes a Saturday. Expect big crowds, lots of kids.
• There’s 250 exhibitors, down from 400 last year. Here’s the Exhibitor List.
• Attendance is expected at about 30,000 visitors. (But most Expo visitors this year got free passes instead of paying the usual $25 fee).
• People are hoping this isn’t the last Macworld but consider the history. As Jim Dalrymple notes: “Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Boston/New York — it failed; Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Tokyo — it failed; Apple pulled out of Apple Expo Paris — it failed.”
• Macworld Expo Floor Hours: Thu 2/11 12pm-6pm; Fri 2/12; 10am-6pm Sat 2/13; 10am-6pm
• Twitter hashtag is #macworld2010

And here, in chronological order, is the top 5 things to do at the show:

Someone is looking for a Steve Jobs look-alike for an “impersonator event” on Friday and Saturday in San Francisco’s SOMA — the area around Macworld.

The actual job isn’t specified, but looking like Steve is important, of course, but so is “punctuality.”

“If necessary, we can provide a black turtleneck and glasses,” the Craigslist ad says.

Pay is $100 a day. Wanna bet it’s handing out Gold Club flyers?

Full text of the Craigslist ad after the jump and check out our Gallery of Uncanny Steve Jobs Look-Alikes

Last month, we wondered how many people would care about the iPad’s restrictive DRM shackles, which makes Apple the only available supplier of software for the iPad through the fact that users can only download software onto the gadget from Apple’s App Store (unless someone figures out a way to jailbreak it — which’ll probably happen within the first 48 hours after it ships, considering the fact that the iPad’s OS is based off the continually jailbroken iPhone, and the supposition that every genius hacker on the planet is spending every waking moment thinking about it).

Anyway, apparently the answer is: thousands.

At the time, Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ remark about ebook pricing being the same whether sold by Cupertino or Amazon seemed rather optimistic. At the time, Amazon controlled ebook pricing and the ebook market, while Apple had just released the iPad. However, just weeks after the tablet was unveiled, Amazon will now adopt Apple’s price structure when the iPad starts shipping in March.

“By agreeing to accept a new pricing model, Amazon has publicly acknowledged the sudden emergence of a rival that may not only threaten its highly popular Kindle franchise but also its total domination of e-books,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.

The first signs of how the iPad will be handled internationally are appearing, including talk of carrier subsidies. Months before Apple said it will announce international deals for the tablet, one carrier is already planning to sell subsidized iPads requiring two-year 3G contracts.

Hutchison Australia reportedly will begin offering the iPad with a $455 (333 Euro) rebate when customers sign-up for a two-year contract offering 5GB of data for $41, or 30 Euro.

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.

That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.

Was the iPad originally meant to be a killer TV platform? An analyst speculates the iPad would be the perfect platform for Apple to launch its vision for anywhere television, tying Apple TV, iTunes and network programming into one sleek and stylish portable DVR.

“Imagine a portable set top box, but with its own killer screen,” wrote Berstein Research analyst Craig Moffett. “Navigation of programming guides and iTunes listings would occur on the iPad, using an intuitive touch interface. Output would go directly to the widescreen TV on the wall.”