Apple MacBook Pro

And, despite the conspicuous absence of Intel's latest Centrino 2 chipset, performance is reasonably strong across the board. The Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor finds itself accompanied by 2GB of DDR3 memory, and it's a partnership which earns 1.17 in our application benchmarks.

It's unfortunate that our battery benchmarks only work under Windows Vista, though, as Boot Camp doesn't currently allow for swapping between the two graphics chipsets. With the GeForce 9600M GT chipset taking over graphical duties, the Macbook Pro only managed 2 hours and 20 minutes of light use battery life. Heavy usage only saw that drop to a paltry hour and 8 minutes.

We expect this has got a lot to do with Nvidia's brand new chipset and immature Vista drivers, as we simulated our light usage test in OS X and found that battery life soared effortlessly over six hours.

Touching the void

One of the major additions to the range is the new trackpad. In its infinite wisdom, Apple has done away with the accompanying button and, instead, the whole trackpad acts as one giant mouse button.

At first it's disconcerting to find the whole trackpad sinking beneath each finger press, but we soon found ourselves acclimatising to it a little, at least in OS X.

The multitouch gestures work well under Apple's OS too, allowing easy manipulation of photos with a range of simple two fingered gestures.

New gestures have been added, though. Sweeping four fingers in an upwards motion triggers Exposé; a feature which makes it startlingly easy to clear the desktop and get to the icons behind. Flicking between open programs is outstandingly nippy too. Just sweep four fingers horizontally and up pops the OS X application switcher.

It's a shame, if not much of a surprise, that the trackpad doesn't work so well under Vista. With one finger left-clicking and three fingers pressed together emulating the right click, we were soon hankering after a standard laptop trackpad and discrete buttons.

The keyboard is a little less divisive but it too is far from perfect. Its scrabble-tile layout is a common sight on Apple laptops these days, but we're not sure Apple has got it quite right here. The keyboard backlighting is a boon for working in low-light, but it's the ergonomics that come as a disappointment.

The keys don't have much travel and despite a reasonably positive action at the end of each stroke, the short-travel keys don't feel particularly nice under the fingers. It's an improvement on the old MacBook Pro's plasticky keyboard, but it's not up to the high standards set by other 15.4in laptops, such as Dell's superb XPS M1530.

Any port in a storm

The final moan comes courtesy of the MacBook Pro's frighteningly stingy attempt at connectivity. To keep the clean, pristine lines of the chassis, Apple has grouped all the ports on the laptop's left-hand side. The meagre two USB ports are flanked by one FireWire 800 port, Gigabit Ethernet and a Mini-Displayport. Dell's business-focussed Latitude series was the first to embrace DisplayPort technology, but the Macbook Pro is the first to adopt the Mini-flavoured variety.

Whether Mini-Displayport is a proprietary Apple venture or a forthcoming standard is yet to be seen but, for the consumer, it means only one thing: if you want to connect an external display you'll need to spend extra on one of Apple's adapters. Single-link DVI or VGA adapters cost £17 apiece, while a dual link DVI adapter costs £59. Bizarrely, Apple doesn't even offer a full-sized Displayport adapter as an option at all.