"Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware," PC World notes. "The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro's PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway's E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook's score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn't care less whether you run Windows."

PC World evaluated the 17-inch/2.4GHz model. Among the MacBook Pro's "pros" were that it's thin and light for a big notebook. Among the "cons": the hard drive isn't user accessible.

"Equipped with a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo T7700 processor, the maximum 4GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and nVidia's new top-of-the-line notebook graphics card, the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT, our $2949 test unit set new speed records," PC World notes. "The MacBook Pro outperformed the rest of the notebooks we tested, all of which claim Windows as their primary --nay, their only -- operating system. We loaded Windows Vista Home Premium on the Apple notebook, and it snagged a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88. In games it achieved a blazing frame rate of 141 frames per second in Far Cry (with antialiasing turned off)."