Apple MacBook Pro (17-inch) review

The 17-inch MacBook Pro comes in one default configuration that costs £1,899. Though there aren't a lot of upgrade options, our review unit included RAM and hard drive enhancements that brought the price up to £2,099. For that much money, you'd expect some pretty high-end specs, and the MacBook delivers -- it has a fast, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of speedy 667MHz DDR2 RAM, an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics card with 256MB of VRAM, and a blazing 7,200rpm, 100GB hard drive. Still, the MacBook Pro is a bit more expensive than similarly configured Windows laptops.

Performance
CNET Labs compared the 17-inch MacBook Pro to a number of older Apple laptops running the PowerPC processor as well as other Core Duo-based Macs. Unsurprisingly, the MacBook Pro trailed behind a PowerBook G4 when running Sorenson Squeeze, which requires the Rosetta translation program to run on the new chipset. But its ample amount of RAM and quick hard drive helped it power through our Photoshop CS test, in spite of Rosetta. (We expect the MacBook Pro's performance to even out once software publishers release more so-called universal binary apps -- however, we recommend checking if your applications are or will soon be Intel-compatible before buying any new Apple system.)

Of course, on native applications such as iTunes, the 17-inch MacBook Pro saw significant gains over the previous generation of PowerBooks. Probably due to its discrete graphics card, the 17-inch MacBook Pro displayed very respectable Doom 3 frame rates, though its 23.2 frames per second (fps) can't compete with the 56.5fps achieved by the Inspiron E1705 we tested. In our DVD battery-drain test, the MacBook Pro lasted 2 hours, 54 minutes -- quite respectable for a desktop replacement that's not likely to see too much time away from the wall socket.