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Our test model's display had a matte, anti-glare finish but you can also choose to have a glossy coating. Surprisingly for Apple, this is available for free. The screen's one of the best we've seen. Our high definition test videos looked bright, sharp and detailed. Colours looked rich and were evenly lit. Transitions from one shade to the next in our greyscale and colour tests were remarkably smooth, so this notebook is suitable for colour-sensitive work, such as image editing.

With such a great screen, we found it a little odd that there's no option to have a Blu-ray or HD-DVD optical drive, and there's no HDMI output for outputting video to a TV. It feels like Apple's slightly missed a trick on this one. The

Considering the size of the screen, you might expect the MacBook Pro to be a huge beast that's difficult to carry around. While we wouldn't want it in a bag all day, at 3kg it's surprisingly light and easy enough to transport occasionally.

Due to the size of the 17in widescreen display, the MacBook Pro's case is quite large, but there's the same keyboard used in the smaller 15in notebooks. It's responsive and comfortable to use, but some keys, including the Return key, are very small and hard to press when touch typing. A slightly larger keyboard would have made more sense. The keys are illuminated and their brightness is automatically adjusted depending on how dark the surroundings are. It's great for typing in low-light and you'll never struggle to find the right key again.

The 17-inch High Resolution MacBook Pro looks great and has one of the best screens we've seen. It's much more portable than some 1080p capable notebooks we've seen, such as Toshiba's Qosmio G40, but lacks a HDMI port and a high definition optical drive. This could be forgiven if it was cheaper, but at £2,339 it's incredibly expensive.