You’ve probably read all about the new MacBook family of laptops, by now. You will have digested Steve Jobs’ speech. You may even have shrugged your shoulders and said: ‘meh’. But, having just had our first play with the the 15.4in MacBook Pro, however, we can reveal right now that the new MacBooks are certainly not to be sniffed at.

The first thing that strikes you about the machine is its incredible build quality. Jobs made much of Apple’s new manufacturing process – pioneered with the MacBook Air – where the main part of the chassis is hewn from a single block of aluminium, and it certainly makes for a very robust-feeling machine. The original Pro was no pansy in this regard, but if that was solid as a rock this is positively granite.

Try to twist the base and you’ll meet firm resistance. Try to flex the lid and there’s no give at all, no showthrough, nada. No matter how hard we pressed we failed to produce the merest hint of a ripple.

The other big news is the huge glass multitouch trackpad. This measures 5in from corner to corner, but the size is only part of the story. There’s no longer a button below it; instead the entire trackpad is clickable. This is no standard tap-to-click pad, though – it’s mechanical. Push it down and after a millimetre or so, it clicks. Time will tell how intuitive this is – it certainly feels a bit weird at first – but it gets around the accidental cursor activation that plagues so many Windows-based machines.

The other part of the trackpad story is that a few new gestures have been introduced. You can now perform a ‘four fingered swipe’ up, down, left and right to activate various features. Placing four fingers on the pad and pulling down clears the screen; swiping them back up, puts your application windows back where they were.

And Apple has now introduced a way of activating the context menu without having to use a keyboard shortcut. A two-fingered tap pops up the context menu, or zones can be set up at the bottom right or left of the trackpad to do the same job.

Apple has ditched the traditional silver-coloured keyboard in favour of trendy, black scrabble tiles, which looks odd, but it feels perfectly pleasant to use. And the screen looks good, too – a 15.4in widescreen with a 1,440 x 900 pixel native resolution and LED backlight, with a glossy glass front that stretches right out to the edges of the lid.

There’s dual graphics here, in the shape of Nvidia’s 9400M integrated graphics and its 9600M GT discreet chipset – you can switch between the two depending on whether you want high performance or longer battery life. And, in an interesting departure for Apple, you can now access the hard drive and battery by removing just the one cover.

Elsewhere, typical Apple design touches abound: the battery gauge has moved from the bottom of the case to the side, so you can see what your battery level is at a glance; there’s an ambient light sensor to dim the screen and light up the keyboard.

All in all, it’s a very luxurious-feeling machine. To see if it stacks up in the performance or value stakes, though, you’ll have to wait for our full review later in the week.

The raw specifications, just to recap are as follows, with two models available initialy: 2.4GHz or 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 2GB or 4GB of RAM, 250GB or 320GB hard disks (SSDs optional), DVD writer (no Blu-ray), Nvidia 9400M / 9600M GT dual graphics with either 256MB or 512MB of dedicated graphics memory, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, Mini DisplayPort, 2 x USB, ExpressCard/34, Mac OS X