The new 17-inch MacBook Pro arrived a little late to the unibody makeover party--most of Apple's laptop line switched to the thinner and lighter, precision-crafted aluminum design back in October 2008. But the new 17-inch laptop is not without under-the-hood innovation. The incremental updates that boost processor, system bus, and RAM speeds are all welcome, but the big news with the 17-inch MacBook Pro is its new battery design. Apple says the new laptop's battery is 40 percent larger than the battery in its 17-inch predecessor, allowing the new 17-inch MacBook Pro to run for up to 8 hours on a single charge.

What's changed

The new 17-inch MacBook Pro comes with the same 5,400-rpm 320GB hard drive as the model it replaces, though you can customize the laptop with a faster 7,200-rpm drive of the same capacity (US$50), or choose between a 128GB ($300) or 256GB ($750) solid state drive (SSD). Like its predecessor, the new laptop comes standard with 4GB of RAM (you can upgrade to the maximum 8GB of RAM for $1,000), but the memory is now of the DDR3 variety running at 1,066MHz instead of the 667MHz DDR2 RAM used previously. The new laptop uses a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up from 2.5GHz in the last generation, though with the same 6MB of L2 cache, and for $300 more you can upgrade to a speedier 2.93GHz processor. The new 17-inch MacBook Pro also features a 1,066MHz front side bus, up from the 800MHz front side bus in the previous 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Like all of the unibody laptops, the 17-inch MacBook Pro uses an environmentally friendly widescreen display with mercury-free LED backlighting and arsenic-free glass. The screen has a native resolution of 1,920-by-1,200 pixels, and with that many pixels occupying just 17 diagonal inches, it's easy to have multiple windows open at once. If you're used to working at lower resolutions (like I am), you'll notice that everything onscreen appears much smaller. I found myself having to zoom my Office documents to 150 percent in order to work on them, something I don't have to do with my 15-inch MacBook Pro and its 1,440-by-900 native resolution.

The new MacBook design puts the glossy screen behind a thin sheet of glass. Glossy screens can look great with bright vibrant colors and deep, rich blacks. Some people, including a few of my fellow Macworld editors, despise the glare from these highly reflective glossy screens. For those gloss-phobic folks, Apple offers an anti-glare option for $50. We weren't able to look at a 17-inch MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen for this review.