The MacBook Pro is the worthy successor to the venerable PowerBook line. It couples the storied industrial design of the Apple team and the legendary ease of use of Mac OS X with the pep of Intel's newest processors.

Physically, the MacBook Pro is almost identical to its predecessor, the 15-inch aluminum PowerBook G4. Same case you're used to, same great screen, same arrangement of ports. You gain a heck of a lot of speed, an integrated iSight webcam, but you lose the ability to output to S-video without an adapter. You also gain a new style of power adapter: it's held in place on the machine with strong magnets, so that if you trip over the power cord, it pulls out of the socket rather than sending your laptop crashing to the floor. The screen is crisp and bright, and you have the option of ordering from the Apple store with a matte, non-reflective screen, or a glossy screen that provides greater color saturation. I opted for the matte screen that's been the standard of PowerBooks past.

Apple made big waves last year when they announced their product line was going to be based on Intel chips; the MacBook Pro was one of the first products to feature the newly introduced Core Duo. As I mentioned, the new chip does indeed run things quite a bit faster than the previous PowerPC based machines, but at a cost: this machine is extremely hot. Even though at 2.0 ghz , one step down from the fastest 2.16 ghz top of the line, I couldn't use it comfortably on my lap, battery or plugged in, for longer than 10 minutes. Your lap may be tougher than mine, so you may not mind it so much.

The transition to Intel chips also brought with it a technology called Rosetta: it transparently translates old PowerPC code into code that will run on the Intel chips. Most major components of the OS have the new Intel code in them, but as of this writing, most major apps like Microsoft Office and Photoshop have yet to make the jump. Rosetta works mostly flawlessly: PowerPoint ran well, and it didn't occur to me that it was being translated until I thought about it. However, there were a few more random application crashes than I'm used to experiencing on my PowerPC based machines.

Switching to Intel chips now means that these machines are able to run Windows. With a few software installs and a valid copy of windows, the MacBook Pro behaves exactly as a Dell or Gateway laptop. This could be a great perk or horrible detriment, depending on how much of a Mac fanatic you are. The software to do this is called Boot Camp, but is still in beta at this point. I didn't try it myself, but many people report great success, despite its beta status.

My machine was great out of the box. I set up an account and used the OS X migration assistant to bring over all my files from my old computer. Everything worked really well for the first several days, but then I began to notice a high-pitched keening or whining sound. Nothing I did made it go away; it was persistent and annoying. Further investigation online revealed that I'm not the only person to experience this, and there are a variety of software fixes that solve the problem to varying degrees.

Knowing that its users are perfectionists and obsessive about design and quality issues, I'm surprised that Apple let this machine out the door with such a widely documented issue.

I couldn't deal with the noise and the heat, but I'm pickier than most. I ended up selling mine to a friend who needed a new machine right away, and didn't mind the noise.

Despite the faults, this is still a good machine. It's really fast, and works as advertised. I recommend you buy one if you're suffering with a PowerPC based machine that's slower than 1.2 ghz, and you need something right now. If you do end up taking the plunge, make sure to get at least a gig of ram.

On the other hand, if you can spare the time, wait until the third or fourth revision of this hardware. Since they were introduced in January, the MacBook Pros have already been revised once; give them some more time to get the hardware kinks worked out and more developers to update their software for the new processors.