The new MacBook Pro 17in comes equipped with a new Core 2 Duo, LED backlit display, new Nvidia graphics, and an updated aluminium chassis with a brand new battery that boasts a battery life of up to eight hours on a single charge.

It can also be recharged around 1,000 times before wearing out, which is approximately five years of normal use and around three times the predicted lifespan of a standard notebook battery.

Brilliant battery

Apple has achieved this by making the battery non-removable. This has the drawback of having to get it professionally replaced when it eventually wears out, but the space saved on hatches and mechanisms has facilitated a bigger, more powerful battery.

And although we've yet to see a price for a new one, the extra cost involved in having it replaced professionally will probably be offset by the fact it will last three times longer than its user-removable cousin.

At under an inch thick and weighing just 6.6 pounds, the new MacBook Pro is described as 'the world's thinnest and lightest 17-inch notebook,' but not at the cost of processing power. Apple's latest packs some serious welly under its gorgeous unibody aluminium shell. In our benchmarking tests, the notebook outperformed its 15-inch predecessor across the board.

The machine's Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor is impressively fast. Using the frame-rate test contained in the popular first-person shooter Doom 3, running at a 1024x778 screen resolution and with all graphical FX options set to their highest levels, it rendered 2148 frames in 38.3 seconds. That's 56.1 frames per second.

The results achieved with 3D rendering benchmarking tool Cinebench (Release 10) were also impressive. The 17" model's single-core score was 2861, a 3.6% increase, and using all its cores it achieved 5867, up 5.2% on its predecessor. And, if you're not carrying out GPU-intensive tasks, you can use the Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics processor.

Final verdict

When encoding digital media, the speeds were solid. Using iTunes 8.0.2, it took six minutes to import an eight-song, 45-minute CD at 128kbps. QuickTime Pro 7.6 exported our five-minute, 720x480, 30fps movie to iPod-friendly resolutions in five minutes, 42 seconds, another good score.

Apple displays have improved and the 17-inch MacBook Pro has an ultra-thin, widescreen 1920x1200 display, offering 78% more pixels and a 60% greater colour gamut than the 15-inch version. Its LED-backlit display uses 30% less energy than fluorescent tube-powered backlights.

Apple's 17-inch MacBook Pro gives us few causes for complaint. An optional Blu-ray drive would be a boon. Also, at almost £2,000 it isn't cheap, but nor is it overpriced.

Apart from the battery, there's no massive advance from the 15-inch model. Even so, an increase in performance is enough to justify Apple's claim that it's 'the most powerful Mac notebook yet.'