
The screen has a glossy finish that does make it less favourable when used outdoors or sitting near windows, however it is bright enough to overcome the common glare problems. The screen is a 13-inch 1280 x 800px LED backlit display that is beautifully vibrant and powered by the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processor, so it handles 3D graphic work and HD video playback where some similarly specced rivals seem to struggle. It also links into the auto-dimming of the screen, so in bright conditions, the backlighting turns off - no point in wasting battery life on illumination that you can't see. The new MacBook Pro range comes with the backlit keyboard, the brightness of which can be adjusted to suit your taste. The separated keys give a nice soft typing action which is responsive and a pleasure to use, although we are starting to hear of keys that detach and need to be replaced: not something that we've experienced ourselves, but perhaps something that will be addressed in future updates.

The seamless deck and neat cut-outs for the various ports and connectors give a premium finish that other manufacturers just don't achieve.

The unibody MacBook Pro is an excellent design, it not only gains the durability boost of an aluminium construction, but it looks fantastic too and is without doubt one of the best looking notebooks money can buy. Technically the two models are very similar, although the higher-spec model has a noticeably faster pace, skipping through tasks, hopping ahead of its slower brother as you'd expect.
