Labs

It's no great surprise that the MacBook Pro is stylish, well built and drew admiring glances throughout its time in the Labs - we've seen enough Apple systems to know what to expect. But it still managed to catch us out with its raw power: with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo T7700 and 2GB of RAM inside, it raced to a benchmark score of 1.17 - top of the pile this month.

The Nvidia 8600M GT graphics aren't quite up there with the 8700s of the Evesham and Rock, but the superb processing power helped it to a still-impressive 40fps in our low Call of Duty 2 test. This makes gaming a real possibility, although if you want to play at the native 1,440 x 900 you'll need to lower the anti-aliasing a little from our test settings: it averaged 28fps.

Build quality is

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almost impossible to fault, rivalled only by the Acer; with a metal chassis everything feels solid and the sturdy lid ensures the screen barely flexes at all. The downside is a weight of 2.5kg, and travellers should note a battery life of just 3 hours under light use. We were impressed by the built-in speakers, though, which have both volume and quality, although music just started to distort at full volume.

The one disappointing feature of the build was the keyboard. Although it's spacious, the Enter key and left Shift key are very slim, and the arrow and Function keys are oddly short. This would be excusable if room were scarce, but by moving the speakers from the side of the keyboard Apple could easily have avoided any key-narrowing.

The touchpad also features only one button, but workarounds can easily be downloaded. And this highlights the other major issue - if you want to run Windows via Boot Camp you'll need to factor in the cost of the OS, making the already sky-high price even higher.

Given that the MacBook Pro is hardly feature-packed compared to the others here, it's clear that you're paying a premium for the design. With both draft-n wireless and gigabit Ethernet, plus the unique proposition of Mac OS, for many that's a price worth paying, but we can see several alternatives this month that offer better value.