Since its introduction early 2003, the 17" MacBook Pro (orginally still called the PowerBook) didn't really change much from the outside. And there was no need to: it was a marvellous design, elegant and beautiful, and the all aluminum enclosure created this "must touch" feeling... while providing a rock solid protection for its internals.

Can't get better? That's what I thought until Apple came up with the new unibody. Instead of assembling the body from many different pieces, the whole thing is now carved from a single block of aluminum. Why should we care? Well, first of all it makes the new MacBook Pro peerlessly beautiful. No joints, no chinks, no screws - just a single piece of beauty. (Well, yes it has a removable bottom plate to access the internals -- so yes, it does have screws... but just the few for the bottom plate as compared to the many all around the previous models.) And second, it makes the body even lighter and at the same time more rugged than it already used to be. And it's more space-efficient on the inside, allowing to pack even more technology into the thinnest 17 inch notebook on the planet.

Speaking of space: the second big breakthrough introduced with the new 17" MBP is a 40% larger battery. That brings us around 8 hours of runtime at normal usage. Ever seen something just remotely comparable in any notebook that light and thin??

Similarly amazing is the new LED high-res screen. 2.3 million pixels (1920x1200), ultra-sharp and with an absolutely amazing color range and contrast. That's a 60% greater color gamut than on the previous model, and a stunning 700:1 contrast. And the 17" offers the choice of a glossy vs. matte display. Now I know there is a huge debate about glossy vs. matte... and have to admit, it's not that simple to decide. I used to have matte displays always - for a good reason: I wanted to see what the computer displayed, and not the reflection of myself or all the other things around me. So I was very skeptical... tested and compared both displays side by side, discussed, and tested again... and finally decided to go with the glossy one. Well, yes, there are reflections, and yes, they can be annoying sometimes. But it's less problematic than on many other glossy screens in the rest of the PC world. And the amazing contrast and colors more than make up for it! The screen is so bright and clear that many reflections will just vanish the second you turn it on.

I could go on forever praising the new MacBook Pro... and I haven't yet talked about Mac OS X -- the most intuitive and most advanced operating system you can get for any machine at all. But after all, it comes down to one simple observation: I've been using Apple's 17" aluminum notebooks now for about 6 years, basically each and every day, in the office, at home, in my spare time, for work, for fun, for development, for entertainment, for everything! The machines have hardly ever been switched off. And I've been loving these notebooks ever more with every new model. The MacBook Pro is just everything you could ever want a notebook to be. It indeed is the ultimate notebook computer -- nothing comes close! It's worth every single penny, and it's the best investment into any computer hardware I've ever made so far!