While not very portable at 15.4 x 10.4 inches with a 17" diagonal screen and weighing 6.8 pounds the new MacBook Pro is near perfection for a laptop in my estimation. Check out some of the specs:
- 17-inch widescreen display (1680 x 1050 resolution, TFT widescreen)
- 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
- 667MHz frontside bus and main memory
- PCI Express architecture
- Up to 120GB Serial ATA hard drive
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with up to 256MB memory on 16-lane PCI Express
- ExpressCard/34 slot
- Dual-link DVI, VGA adapter included
- FireWire 400, FireWire 800 (missing on the 15" model), and 3 USB 2.0 ports
- Optical digital and analog audio I/O, built-in microphone, built-in iSight camera and stereo speakers
- Slot-loading SuperDrive
- Illuminated keyboard, Scrolling TrackPad
- Built-in AirPort Extreme (802.11g), Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and Gigabit Ethernet
- Mac OS X Tiger with iLife 06 featuring iWeb, iWork 06 trial, and more.
- MagSafe Power Adapter
I enjoy using a 15" G4 PowerBook. The display is awesome, the wireless adpater is carefree and the performance is very good, but the new 17 " MacBook Pro should really scream along. However, it is a bit too big for my comfort level as a portable laptop and I have to wonder how good the battery life can be with such a large screen. But as a desktop replacement it should do very well. The graphics card for a laptop is one of the best I seen with exception for the Alienware notebooks which use 256 MB Nvida adapters and have slightly larger dimensions.