Please excuse the treble-post, this is the last update to the MacBook Pro saga

Despite an estimated delivery date of the 25th, Apple did their usual under-promise-over-deliver thing and managed to get my new computer to me yesterday. I was thrilled! Also on the order were a bag and a slip case, but I just want to quickly mention the printer I spec'd from the Apple site: HP Officejet Pro 8500A

Firstly, why did I buy this printer? Well, it's listed by Apple, which basically means it has their endorsement in terms of compatibility. All HP printers work really well with OS X, but I wanted to go the extra mile...

...and wow am I impressed! The machine itself is really nice, but it also has a pretty big resistive touchscreen running an actually-quite-intuitive OS! All I did was set up WiFi via this panel and the whole thing was set up. It checked for an update and downloaded new firmware without any messing around. The bonus is, because it's AirPrint, I can now easily and wirelessly print directly from my iOS devices. Yes, this is an Apple-like printer if ever I owned one. I haven't installed the HP software of course, there's rarely any need to install printer bloatware on a Mac because the OS does it all for you, even displaying a picture of the actual printer you've bought as the icon.

As for the MacBook Pro, it seems there's nothing not to like. First charge, I was on it for about 7 hours yesterday and it still reports 2 remaining. That's a lot of battery! Clearly it hasn't engaged the dedicated ATI graphics as I haven't done anything that'd require it (beware, though, certain apps like Twitter make use of graphics libraries that will cause the dedicated graphics to engage), but I'm really impressed. The keyboard is firmer and gives better feedback than the Rev A and Rev C MacBook Airs, and the high-res glossy screen is 'gorgeous' - the viewing angles are much better than the old Airs.

Performance is a bit of a joke. It's hard to say how fast it is because everything I've done so far has happened instantly. Fully quit apps, like Safari, iTunes, Address Book, iCal, open immediately. Even installing Microsoft Messenger made me jump because the install process stole the dock to insert the Messenger icon and put it back again immediately after I hit install. It's disconcerting... and I also don't understand why it seems faster than my iMac which also has an SSD primary. I think a factory install of Lion may have a lot to do with it - upgrading from Snow Leopard seems to have had undesirable performance consequences on every Mac I've done it on and this is the first real proof. I'll be monitoring that closely. I've never had to reinstall the OS on a Mac for performance reasons so it'd be a sad day if I have to go back to the other Macs and do that, but I'm not going to forgo this kind of performance now I know how nimble Lion can be.

But yes, I'm thrilled. The 15" was definitely the right choice in terms of screen real estate, and at the price of some portability I've retained great battery life but gained an incredible amount of speed. Having the quad-core CPU with turbo boost and the dedicated ATI graphics with a gig of RAM backing the experience up is reassuring. For the money I ended up paying, quite honestly, anything less than perfection would have been a big disappointment. But Apple have delivered on this one, and while I could've got a similar spec for less from a different manufacturer I'm comfortable in the knowledge that I'll get value for money from this machine over its 3-4 year useful life and hopefully, like its 15" predecessor, well beyond.

Now, excuse me, I need to go download World of Warcraft