Many have tried to emulate the two- to four-fingered swipes and pinches, with little success. The clickable touchpad is easily the largest and most multi-touch friendly among its peers, so there's plenty of room to execute all your favorite gesture-based commands. The MacBook Pro 13-inch's backlit keyboard is invaluable in low-lit environments, and it's ambient, too, meaning the brightness levels are automatically adjusted based on lighting conditions. Few, however, have been able to include an LED-backlit keyboard at this price. The 13 user experience on the MacBook Pro 13-inch (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz) is one of the most revered, as the island-style keyboard has since been adopted by many of its competitors. At some point, I would love to see Apple include a display with a matte finish, instead of the lone glossy option, which has a tendency to emit glare. The Asus U30Jc-1A has a similar resolution to the MacBook Pro 13-inch.

The 13.3-inch widescreen is one of the few remaining ones that use a 1,280-by-800 resolution (most laptops have transitioned over to a 1,366-by-768 resolution, or in geek-speak, a 16:9 aspect ratio). The business-class Sony VAIO VPC-Z116GXS ($1,800 direct, ) has a similar footprint, but weighs just 3 pounds. A thick slab of aluminum has some drawbacks, though: at 4.5 pounds, the MacBook Pro 13-inch is one of the heaviest 13-inch laptops in the business. Others, like the mainstream laptop Editors' Choice Asus U30Jc-1A ($899 list, ) and the Asus UL80Vt-A1 ($823 list, ), use aluminum only on the top cover the rest of the chassis is made out of plastic. Similarly designed laptops like the Dell Adamo XPS ($2,000 direct, ) and HP Envy 13 ($1,899 direct, ) aren't as solidly made as the MacBook Pro. The 'Unibody' frame (built from a single block of aluminum) isn't just attractive it's also tough, and its matte finish is impervious to smudges and fingerprints. The Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch's design hasn't changed, and that's just fine by me. But if you're new to the MacBook Pro family, this is the ticket to portable computing bliss. If you bought the MacBook Pro 13-inch ($1,199 direct, ) last year, it isn't worth the upgrade.

Updated components are all you'll get with the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz) ($1,199 direct), but they can be compelling for many.

Macbook pro 15 core 2 duo 2.4 ghz