Review of Apple MacBook Pro MD313LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop

I have the 500GB/2.4GHz Core i5 version. The hardware quality alone makes it worth the price, and MAC OS X Lion adds another layer of excellence.

As others have said, the attention to detail in the hardware is superb, most notably the aluminium unibody chassis, the vivid LCD screen (1280 x 800), the panel hinge and the unsurpassed trackpad. The baseline Macbook Pro represented here is a beautifully engineered embodiment of the Intel Sandy Bridge mobile platform with integrated HD 3000 graphics.

I have a few minor negatives to share, but nothing that would warrant docking a star from the rating:

1) You won't be getting iWeb or iDVD as part of the iLife package pre-installed with the machine. You still get iMovie and Garageband, though.

2) 4GB of memory is on the edge of being too little, depending on how many applications you are apt to leave open during a working day. You may be glad that it is easy to upgrade the RAM on this machine to 8GB.

3) The integrated graphics are weaker than the previously supported nVidia discrete graphics in the Core 2 Duo MacBooks. You now have to step up to the 15" Macbooks to get a machine suitable for graphics-intensive tasks (other than video encoding and playback). But, unless you use your machine for gaming or 3-d animations you are unlikely to miss the graphics prowess of a discrete GPU.

These days Windows has gained much of the stability and usability that used to be the sole province of Mac OS, so the preference for Mac OS is less compelling than it once was. Nevertheless, the use of a large, ergonomic trackpad with reliable and accurate gesture recognition *built into the OS* is a wonderful thing, and not easy to give up once you've experienced it. Windows 8 may take that distinction away as well, but so far I've not come across PC hardware good enough to make the experience as complete as it is with currently is with a late 2011 Macbook.