It's Boxing Day sales time, and as part of Dick Smith's massive sale on notebooks and Ultrabooks there is now a flat 10% off all Apple MacBooks. In our view one of the best deals going among the Apples is the MacBook Pro 15in (MD318LL/A) for $1,889.10. It has a very fast 2nd Gen Intel Core i7, one of the better mid-range graphics cards and is exceptionally well-built; with the famous MacBook Pro aluminium unibody that has both incredible strength and a premium feel that few other notebooks can match. It's an elegant looking powerhouse that, in this deal, offers good value for money.
Processor
The MacBook has a 2nd Gen Intel Core i7-2675QM (2.2GHz), a high-end processor that can fluidly run intensive software and productivity applications. It can burst up to 3.1GHz using Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology if a particularly demanding program is running.
Graphics
It comes with a dedicated graphics card called the AMD Radeon HD 6750M. It’s one of the fastest mid-range AMD cards, and most Mac modern games will run smoothly at high settings.
RAM
4GB of RAM is enough to run several programs at once smoothly. It's also enough to ensure fluid performance with reasonably intensive tasks such as video editing.
Storage
It has a 500GB hard disk drive, which is about average in size. This will be enough for plenty of programs and data.
Screen
The 15.4in (1,440x900 resolution) gloss screen is higher resolution than most notebooks of the same size.
Portability
The MacBook is a big laptop so its weight of 2.54kg is not surprising, but it will be straightforward to carry around.
Other Features
The MacBook has a Thunderbolt port, a new standard developed by Intel that allows for exceptionally high data transfer speeds that's nearly three times as fast as the USB 3.0 standard found on most Wintel laptops. Only problem is there aren't many drives to take advantage of it yet.