First Look: Apple 17-inch High Resolution MacBook Pro

 

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Posted on 6 Aug 2007 at 15:58

Apple's 17-inch High Resolution MacBook Pro wants to tap into the HD market, with its huge 1,920x1,200 screen. This has a high enough resolution to watch 1080p movies, and plenty of room for you to work on, too.

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 only concession to HD video, is the iMovie HD software which can edit HDV camcorder footage; however, you've then got no way of writing edited footage to an HD optical disc.

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.

Author: Alan Lu