Apple MacBook Pro

Yet another design nicety is the backlit keyboard. In low light the entire set of keys lights up from beneath. Anyone who's sat on a long flight and wasted most of their battery power pressing the wrong keys will appreciate this. You can't adjust the threshold at which the backlight activates, though, which led to the backlight ping-ponging on and off at one point when we were in 'halfway' lighting.

So it's a gorgeous piece of kit. Should you abandon thoughts of a Windows-based notebook and scurry into the open arms of Apple? It certainly isn't an open-and-shut case. The MacBook's front-loading optical drive can't write to dual-layer media, which would earn any Windows-based notebook at this price heavy criticism. And then there are the perennial problems with Mac OS; its virtual memory handling has never been up to the same levels as Windows', and you need to make sure you've got plenty of RAM to avoid problems. Apple made sure we experienced none by fitting our test unit with 2GB, and we suggest anyone wanting to do serious work on the MacBook does the same.

The MacBook has nudged at least one person in the PC Pro office closer to the purchase of an Apple computer. But many who saw it were unimpressed in comparison to the best of Windows-based notebooks. Cast your eyes to p61 and take a look at the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ1VP. It's lighter, at least as fast, has two graphics adaptors, it's arguably as good-looking, battery life is markedly better and it costs nearly £200 less.

In a nutshell, none of us here are abandoning Windows, but there's no doubt the MacBook could make a superb complement to a Microsoft-based desktop machine if you're prepared to put the effort into getting to know Mac OS X.

Author: David Fearon