Apple’s Macbook Pro 17-inch

The MacBook Pro has been around for a while now and although the basic design has remained the same for the past few years Apple routinely upgrades the hardware every year to whatever is latest that Intel has to offer. This year it was the Sandy Bridge series of processors, along with a switch from NVIDIA discrete graphics to AMD. Then there was the addition of Thunderbolt, another Intel tech, previously known as Light Peak. Finally, you have the new Face Time HD camera and that completes the list of changes in the latest generation MacBook Pros. But those are just words. How does it perform in the real world? We got the top of the line 17-inch model to find out.
The MacBook Pro is an amazing looking machine with fantastic attention to detail, such as the hidden indicator light on the front, the ventilation slots near the display hinge, the battery indicator on the side and the magnetic latch for the display that can be opened with one finger without lifting the base up with the lid. It’s also wonderfully built and, despite the bulky size, is not too heavy, all thanks to the aluminum used in the design. However, the design is far from perfect. The USB ports on the side are placed too close to each other, which means if you stick a USB flash drive in one port the one next to it becomes unusable.
The quality of display itself is excellent, with gorgeous colors and high contrast, which makes everything pop. The 17-inch model that we tested gets a superb 1920 x 1200 resolution display.
It has a 2.2GHz (3.0GHz using Turbo Boost) quad-core Intel Core i7 2670QM processor, have a configuration options of 2.3GHz (3.1GHz using Turbo Boost) quad-core Core i7 2820QM, 4GB DDR3 RAM.
750GB 5400rpm hard drive, have a configuration options 500GB, 7200rpm hard drive, 128GB, 256GB or 512GB SSD.
On-board Intel HD Graphics 3000, discrete AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB memory, built-in SuperDrive.
One Thunderbolt port, three USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, one Gigabit Ethernet jack, ExpressCard slot, FaceTime HD camera, built-in microphone, stereo speakers, audio in/out jacks.
Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR.
The MacBook Pro comes with Mac OS X Lion pre-installed. Along with all the default applications, you also get the iLife ‘11 suite, which includes iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.
The user experience was consistently smooth and fluid and the machine would make light work of hardware intensive tasks, such as image editing, video encoding/editing, high definition video playback, etc.
Apple claims the battery life figure can go up to 7 hours of wireless web browsing.
The 17-inch MacBook Pro is priced at Rs. 1,42,900. True, that’s quite steep. The best part about this particular model is that it feels as fast as a iMac but at the same time remains thin and light enough to be carried around in your bag. If that’s something you want and if money is not a concern then the 17-inch MacBook Pro comes highly recommended.