Best of 2008: The Most Impressive Laptops

At first glance Apple's updated MacBook Pro appears nearly identical to its predecessor. But it's not. Inside and out, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro has been remodeled, redesigned, and reengineered. Instead of assembling the laptops piecemeal and splicing the components together, Apple has introduced a unibody architecture that constructs the entire machine out of a single piece of recyclable aluminum.

The unibody composition makes the new laptops easier to service and fix, and great for do-it-yourself types who, in the past, have lamented how difficult it was to swap out the hard drive or battery. The redesigned MacBook Pro makes accessing those particular components easy--just push the lever on the bottom of the case, and you're in.

The MacBook Pro's bright, glossy, 15.4-inch, wide-screen, LED-backlit monitor is pure joy to behold. The 1440-by-900-pixel screen is no longer encased in a metal bezel, but rather seems to float on its own, ringed by a deep black frame. You no longer have a choice of screen finishes, unfortunately, and many users will grumble about the glossy surface. But our reviewer found it striking, showing grayscale gradations that are virtually undetectable on matte screens. The results also have a 3D quality that makes everything on screen burst with energy and vivid color.