Apple boldly claims that the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is the thinnest and lightest notebook in its class. The new notebook has a couple of feature distinctions that makes it deserve a separate post of its own. 

First of all, the giant notebook is just 0.98” thick and 6.6 pounds in weight, which is actually not that big an improvement, considering the previous one was 0.02” thicker and weighed just about the same. Of course, when you compare this with say the Dell XPS M1730, a 2” thick notebook with a starting weight of 10.6 pounds, you know what this means. 

The new notebook of course features the new strong unibody enclosure, power graphics, with a glass trackpad and glossy glass display. This time round, thankfully, Apple has included a $50 optional antiglare display. The reason for this high cost is that the engineers have to remove the entire bezel to fit in the antiglare filter. Why this isn’t included in the standard feature set, who knows. 

The 17-incher’s biggest change is the inclusion of a high capacity non user-replaceable battery. The new battery claims an 8 hour uptime and can be recharged upto a 1000 times. 

To do this, Apple engineers custom-designed lithium-polymer cells to create the largest possible battery, then they went even further: They built the battery right into the computer, eliminating the space-consuming mechanisms and housings that standard removable batteries require. The result is a battery that’s 40 percent bigger than the previous generation and offers up to 8 hours of wireless productivity on a single charge.

We’re impressed! We’ll wait till we can actually test this out at the SA labs, but for now we’re going to assume that this powerhorse can stay alive for at least 7 good hours. 

The specs of the MacBook have been dramatically improved. The standard configuration features a 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB L2 cache on a 1066Mhz front side bus. The build to order features a 2.93Ghz processor! The standard configuration now comes with 4GB of memory, with an option to upgrade to 8GB. The 320GB 5400 rpm hard drive can be upgraded to 320GB 7200rpm drive, or a 256GB SSD drive. For a full run down, take a look at the tech specs page. 

Overall this is a fantastic upgrade for the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The notebook is screaming fast, has ample memory, and has all of the latest technology.