Apple MacBook Pro

This laptop comes with Intel 2.33GHz Core2 Duo Processor, 1GB RAM upgradeable up to 3GB and 120GB HDD. It has a DVD writer and a 15.4-inch widescreen display. This MacBook laptop also has an integrated ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card, integrated modem and sound card, inbuilt camera, touchpad Mouse, inbuilt speakers and microphone, S-Video port, two Firewire ports, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes in black with Lithium Polymer and Mac OS X Tiger. 

Design and Build

The design and build of the MacBook Pro is top notch.  For someone who has used and handled (although admittedly never owned) several Dells, HPs, and Compaqs (dang their University contracts) the step up in quality was very much appreciated.

Screen

 The Apple engineers made a tough choice to shave 60 precious vertical pixels off an already widescreen aspect in order to integrate the high quality iSight cam.  It still isn't as wide as the 16:9 movies I like to watch so it doesn't bother me at all that this was done.  I'm one of those crazies who actually uses the web cam so I consider it a fair trade.  The resolution is way better than the one found on the W3J, which was one of the things that bummed me about that notebook (1440x900 vs 1280x768)

Battery Life

Battery life is good but not great.  I get about 3 hours and 15 min with half brightness (more than adequate) when I am using my laptop to type stuff up and browse the web.  I haven't tried to play WoW on the battery, but I never plan to so I am pretty pleased with it.  It is pretty good juice for such a slim notebook.

Wireless

Wireless works great and has decent range as far as I know.  My apartment is pretty small so the "Airport Extreme" has no problems dropping out of strong signal strength.  It does seem to have better pickup than my wife's IBM T40.  I do appreciate that in OS X it automatically connects to the strongest available wireless network.

Sound

The speakers dominate the left and right side of the keyboard.  Bass is obviously not great, but it is pretty decent sound for a laptop if you ask me.  The placement of the speakers helps to project the audio so you don't have to worry about your belly blocking the sound (like front mounted speakers found on the HP line). Volume is fine for the movies (divx) I've seen and the audio output with headphones is great.

Pros:

• Very well built
• Great overall performance
• Smaller dimensions and weighs less than other laptops in its class (1lb less than the Acer 8204 for example)
• Can run Windows XP or OS X (and potentially Linux)
• Very quiet
• Amazingly bright non-glare type screen
• High quality web cam
• Decent battery life
• Plays WoW like a champ
• Comes with a remote for media and powerpoint

Cons:

• Somewhat hot when plugged in
• Boot Camp not quite ready for the masses
• Underclocked GPU