Apple MacBook Pro 17 inch Laptop (Quad-Core i7 2.4GHz, RAM 4GB, HDD, 750GB, HD Graphics, Radeon HD6770M SD)

I have been an IT guy since the 90's and always stayed away from the "dreaded Mac"! I finally took the plunge and decided to see what it was all about. Since some of my AutoCAD programs are Windows based only I decided to use Parallels VM to run Windows-Only applications. After the first week I decided I would never go back to a PC. The boot is extremely fast and so all all of the applications!

Well what can i say...
Firstly i'd like to say what a beautifully crafted and well engineered machine this is.

I've been using macs personally since 2003 and they just let you get on with your work (and play) without the babysitting of windows annoyances.

My primary use is for art within games development.
It works well with Maya, Adobe creative suite CS and many other industry standard software applications.
I would recommend this 17" macbook pro for creatives.

The only con is the hard drive. Although a roomy 750gb it's only 5400rpm and a little slow.
I highly recommend you upgrading to an SSD which is very easy to install.
(I installed a crucial M4 256gb and it has made the machine a speed monster).

This laptop is wasting my time. No, not because it is slow or anything, it is just so beautiful that I can't go for more than five minuets without looking at the extremely beautiful and well made unibody enclosure. Iv'e had it for about a week and I haven't had a SINGLE problem or error (well apart from the time Team fortress 2 and portal crashed, but that was an issue with the applications). The sound on this laptop is the best I have ever heard on any laptop, and the superdrive is great for playing CD's and movies. I have managed so far to get about 3 hours of full brightness, 10 hours in the dark, and about an hour of solid gaming or other intensive use. It is very light and only 0.98 inches or about 2 cm thick. Now, when I was thinking about buying this item, I wondered wether it could run games, and the simple answer is yes, but let's get in to more detail. So far, I have tested 3 games, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft. Let's start with Portal. It is a very fun puzzle game involving a gun with fires Portals. This game is a great way to test a GPU because the computer may have to render up to four separate worlds when looking through portals. The laptop copes with this extremely well, with minimal lag and is able to maintain a fluid frame rate even when running at a native resolution with all graphic options maxed. Now for Team Fortress 2, as it is a first-person shooter it requires a decent frame rate for you to be able to get out of the way of a garage of bullets heading your way, and send a lot back. The MacBook Pro delivers high frame rates in spades. Last up it's Minecraft, possibly the most intensive application I have on my MacBook to date. The reason being it has to randomly generate, load and render an infinite world with trees, animals and monsters. While not testing the GPU as much, it certainly tests the CPU and RAM, as due to the sheer amount of things happening at once. The MacBook Pro seems to deliver a steady frame rate of around 40 Fps to 60 Fps, depending on the amount of stuff on-screen. This for me is an amazing difference as before on my Samsung R730 it would average a measly 1 Frame a second. It was a nice slide show though.The MacBook Pro doesn't just excel at gaming, it's beautiful display displays High-definition images well. But aside from it's backlit keyboard and light sensor which means the display is only as bright as it needs to be, it's party piece has to be its rather large tempered glass multitouch trackpad. For instance, you touch anywhere on the trackpad and it registers a click. Touch with two fingers it's a secondary click, or "right" click. Move two fingers up and down to scroll up and down, left and right for left and right. Use 3 fingers to drag, move 4 fingers up to see everything you have running. Spread all4 fingers out to see the desktop, and theres the old time favourite, pinch to zoom. I would recommend this, so go buy one now and have a high quality computer that works for you, not the other way round. PS: It is extremely easy to set up, as reflected by the extremely thin users manual.