I'm not sure I'm a fan of this new layout. The old one tended to have plenty of whitespace to give it a clean, open feel. This more boxy one looks pretty cramped in my browser (Firefox).
I think they have a few issues with content/navigation as well. Certainly they could do with someone more internationally aware checking the wording, because to those of us who don't use the bizarre US date order, "Coming Februrary 10" sounds like your web site is nearly a year out of date...
"February 10" isn't that U.S.-specific. When writing out dates numerically, the mm/dd/yy is very American, but when writing out the month in words, there's not a lot of international consistency between whether people from various countries write "February 10" versus "10th February" or "10 February" or even "10. February" when writing in English. Here in Denmark it seems to be pretty evenly split (when writing English). This University of Copenhagen page uses both on the same page!: http://www.math.ku.dk/english/
"February 10" to mean February 2010 is pretty uncommon in most countries though, isn't it? Maybe February '10, but not February 10.
As far as I can see the general layout is unchanged.
What has changed is the navigation bar and the product selection boxes on the Mac and iPod pages. (You previously had to scroll horizontally, now there are tabs.) It could be that they also de-cluttered those two Mac and iPod pages and removed a few elements. I’m not sure about that. What I am sure about is that all the product pages are unchanged. (Apple’s product pages tend to be heavily customized. They don’t follow one layout, they can be very different.)
So, no less whitespace than before.
(Apple.com is the US website, not Apple’s international website.)
I think they have a few issues with content/navigation as well. Certainly they could do with someone more internationally aware checking the wording, because to those of us who don't use the bizarre US date order, "Coming Februrary 10" sounds like your web site is nearly a year out of date...