Mac Book Pro or a new Core i7 for Xmas this year ?
Apple seems to be a little behind the eight ball with technology.
If you want thin, long battery life and are willing to pay a premium then the Mac Book pro is for you.

The 3 Mac Book Pro's

The 17-inch MacBook Pro was the first to use Apple’s integrated batteries out of necessity. Apple wanted to build a slim, attractive 17-inch MacBook Pro, and cutting down on battery volume enabled that. A side effect was that the 17-inch model has impressive battery life.

Paired with a 95Whr battery, Apple promised up to 8 hours of battery life – a realistically attainable figure as you’ll soon see.

From a hardware perspective the 17” isn’t that much different from the rest of the lineup. The system starts with a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset, adds a separate GeForce 9600M for GPU intensive workloads (3D games, OpenCL apps, etc…) and gives you the option of either a 2.8GHz or 3.06GHz 45nm Core 2 Duo with a 6MB L2 cache. The vast majority of users will find the 9400M is sufficient for their needs. And paired with Snow Leopard, the 9600M in the off state doesn’t sap as much battery power as it did under Leopard.

The machine starts with 4GB of memory, expandable up to 8, and comes with a 500GB 5400RPM SATA drive. SSDs are still only optional from Apple.

For the full review of the NVIDIA powered Mac Book Pro’s head on over to AnandTech