MB470LL/A MacBook Pro 15.4 Inch Laptop

• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 14.4 x 1 inches; 5.5 pounds
  
• Redesigned MacBook with thin, strong aluminum unibody frame and 15-inch LED-backlit glass display
  
• New glass trackpad with 40 percent more tracking area and supports more Multi-Touch gestures
  
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 250 GB hard drive, 2 GB DDR3 RAM (4 GB max), DVD/CD SuperDrive
  
• Dual NVIDIA graphics (integrated and discrete); Draft-N Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 2.1; Gigabit Ethernet; Mini DisplayPort video output
  
• Preloaded with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system and iLife '08 suite of applications
  

Very Impressive. I have worked as a professional software developer/architect for 17 years. I started with MSDOS 2.0 and have ridden the Microsoft wave all the way through Vista 64 and I had a few years with UNIX. I have personally owned or worked with computers from Dell, HP, Compaq, IBM. I have heard of Apple products but for the most part dismissed them as more toy than tool. (I was not alone in this perspective.) I like Microsoft but after working with it for the better part of 20 year I decided to look at something different.

I never thought I would purchase an Apple yet here it is. I am impressed to say the least and I see Apple as a serious tool that also makes a cool toy.

Lightweight- Probably the lightest laptop I've ever worked with or owned

Solid - Normally when you get laptops at 15.4 or larger, chassis flex becomes evident as you can see them bend and they creak. Yet because of its single piece construction and light weight aluminum the MacBook feels good when you need to move it. I doesn't creak and there is no noticeable bend when lifted.

Battery Life - It just keeps going, and going, and going... Actually I am seeing up to 4 hours life on the fully charged battery. My previous computer never surpassed 1.75 hours.

Size - It is very thin and carrying it around is very comfortable. I had a 17" and while I like the large display its uncomfortable to carry like a book.

Display - The display is a work of art. No only does it look good, but flex has been reduced to almost nothing. It feels very solid and you don't feel you need to worry about tilting the screen from the corner. The glass cover over the LED lit LCD display is awesome. You can actually clean the screen without LCD screen colors distorting. Not to mention that is automatically dims in low light and the key board lights up in the same low light conditions. that's a nice touch. The display brightness is every bit as bright as my desktop LCD display in strong light.

Touch Pad - Any who has tried to use the touch pads on other computers (I hate them generally) will love this touch pad. It works like the iPhone (except scrolling is reversed for obvious reasons - you're not actually touching the screen). The touch is light and very smooth. Making the entire touch pad the button is brilliant, it took me almost no time to get use to it and now I nearly push a hole through the Dell touch pad before I realize I have to click the buttons. I have no trouble with inadvertent touch that moves my cursor away from where I'm typing.

Quiet - I have yet to hear the fans. It makes me wonder if they ever work.

Operating System - WOW. Fast, no anti-virus, stable: it just works. I won't get too much into the OS but I will say that once I understood how Apple likes things done OS X is very appealing. Not to mention that it sleeps and wakes up faster than anything I have ever worked with. Open the monitor and it's sitting there saying "come on, I'm tired of waiting for you".

I could go on further but I think this is enough. Apple has truly developed a great product in both hardware and software and I recommend it highly.

I'm absolutely delighted with this purchase. Everything just works. Although I'm still finding my way around in some areas, I am reveling in the joy of a human-use-oriented user interface. I installed VMware fusion based on my comparisons between it and Parallels, and on my experience with VMware on other platforms. I exported my work machine with VMware Converter and imported it into Fusion. Works great. Performance is at least as good as it was on the old machine (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM)--and stability is much better. Integration of Windows apps into OS X is excellent using Fusion's Unity mode. I have not had to revert to my work-issued HP laptop even once since making the jump.