This 17-inch MacBook Pro was announced during the Apple keynote at the Macworld conference in San Francisco on January 6th, 2009.  It is Apple's first 17-inch model to adopt the unibody, aluminum design and the glass, multi-touch trackpad used in the October 2008 refreshes of the regular MacBook and the 15-inch MacBook Pro. The laptop starts at a lofty $2,800, but it has a few tricks up its proverbial sleeve to justify the price. Apple hopes you'll be particularly pleased with the battery life, which is rated (by the company itself) at eight hours and 1,000 recharges — very unusual for a laptop with a large, power-draining 17-inch display. Unfortunately, the battery is not removable.

Also notable are its measurements: it's 0.98 inches thick, and weighs 6.6 pounds. It's not so light that it's easy to carry around, but you'd be hard pressed to do better with another 17-inch laptop.

Like its 15-inch sibling, the 2009 MacBook Pro has two graphics solutions: an integrated GeForce 9400M graphics chipset, and a more powerful GeForce 9600M dedicated graphics card. The former operates in power-saving mode, while the latter can be activated for greatly increased performance at a significant cost to battery life. Other specifications reflect the 17-inch models' commitment to high-end performance, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 6 MB L2 cache, a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel LED-backlit display with a 700:1 contrast ratio, a 320 GB hard disk drive, and 4 GB of RAM at 1,066 MHz. If you have the cash, you can customize it at purchase with higher end hardware like a 2.93 GHz processor or 8 GB of RAM.