Hands-On With the New MacBook Pro

I just saw the new MacBook Pro for the first time over at MicroCenter on Friday. I was just as blown away with it as I was by Lauren's new MacBook. The biggest differences are the Pro has a larger, brighter screen (15" vs. 13"), a better graphics card, and a little speedier. I continue to be blown away by the touchpad on Apple's new notebooks and think I am more impressed with the desingn of these than I am by the iMac. Overall, the new MacBook Pro struck me as being a near-perfect, portable desktop replacement.

Apple continues to increasingly impress me with the fluidness of of their operating system. It's like it just gets out of the way of whatever it is you're trying to do. It looks like I'm not the only one who feels this way:

After months of reviewing Windows desktops and laptops, I put the new $1,600 MacBook through its paces--and it was like returning from a backward country where nothing works only to find your homeland is even better than you remembered.

Apple specializes in mini-malist design that simply works better. Each MacBook, for instance, is carved out of a single block of aluminum, and this unibody construction creates a stronger, lighter chassis that looks like a work of art.

Likewise, while some of the PC laptops I tried have two separate sets of mice on board--in case you prefer one type over the other--Apple's pointing system has evolved on the new laptops so that the (only) mouse consists of a single glass touch pad. Push the entire pad down to click, or configure it so a double tap does the same job.

Cooler yet is the touch pad's iPhone-like gesture system. Drag one to four fingers across the surface to perform a variety of tasks--move your cursor, zoom, scroll through documents, even navigate among alternate desktops you can create on your machine.

The best MacBook feature, however, is the Leopard operating system, which I find so much simpler, more stable and more straightforward than Windows Vista. The only possible argument anyone can make in the latter's favor is that, well, it powers some mighty cheap machines.

Agreed. Unless I get another tablet PC, I don't see myself getting anything other than a Mac next time around.