But one model didn’t quite make the leap: the Macbook Pro 13. Apple’s high-end consumer portable has grown into one of their most popular models during its one-year lifespan, amassing a growing fan base in the corporate world, the travel industry, and amongst Apple’s huge consumer base. The notebook was praised as a high-performance portable upon its 2009 release, though we can’t help but feel that the 2010 edition falls slightly flat next to its bigger brothers.

The 15 and 17-inch Macbook Pros found themselves kitted out with new processors, faster RAM chipsets, and a more powerful graphics processor for 2010. The Macbook Pro 13, however, has gained little more than a slight processor speed upgrade and a bigger hard drive, both features which were available as optional extras throughout 2009.

Performance is up slightly from last year, with the new Macbook Pro 13 ripping video and audio at greater speeds than last year’s model. Apple’s Superdrive technology is unchanged from last year, hinting that the greater multimedia performance is due to the upgraded processor and quicker RAM alone, and not the work of a new optical drive.

The new Macbook Pro 13 is also a commendable gaming machine, boasting improved performance across our series of in-game frame rate tests. Apple have never been championed for their gaming pedigree, though with Steam available on Mac OS X and a growing number of titles sharing support across multiple platforms, the Macbook Pro 13 could soon become a go-to gaming notebook.

Mac OSX Snow Leopard is installed as standard, with Apple’s impressive software lineup also included. Carrying out basic tasks on the Macbook Pro 13 is bliss; the laptop’s keyboard is one of the most comfortable around, while the trackpad offers a variety of quick-fire shortcuts and app-specific settings for users.

The new Macbook Pro certainly isn’t Apple’s most innovative or powerful laptop, though it is one of their best all-round pieces of technology. Thanks to a ten-hour battery life and surprisingly agile performance for a compact laptop, the Macbook Pro 13 is one of our favourite laptops for remote workers and mobile professionals.

Despite receiving fewer new parts of noticeable upgrades than its 15 and 17-inch counterparts, the latest Macbook Pro 13 remains one of our favourite laptops. It’s the perfect starter laptop for Mac users, combining the compact form of the standard Macbook but lacking the limited performance of the Macbook Air. Priced from £1,100 it’s certainly no bargain, though it is worth the investment for a compact, effective, and extremely travel-friendly piece of kit.

This is in addition to the system’s already impressive design and durability. Built out of aluminium and designed to survive all but a nuclear attack, the new Macbook Pro range has been called the most physically solid laptop lineup of the last decade. It’s a selling point that’s pushing many PC users to consider a simultaneous upgrade and conversion. But is it really worth it?

Apple’s flagship laptop is the Macbook Pro 17 – a seventeen-inch multimedia laptop more at home in a creative suite than a crowded office. It’s hugely powerful, sleek and stylish, and priced closer to a high-end piece of professional technology than a consumer-focused laptop. Apple have chosen to revamp the laptop for 2010, adding a 512MB nVidia graphics card and quad-core processor as standard.

With a price tag of almost £1,700 these features are more of an expectation than a welcome bonus, though the Macbook Pro 17 still offers immense value. Performance is stunning – a combination of the powerful quad-core Intel processor and Apple’s highly optimized OS X Snow Leopard. The 17-inch model ships with 4GB of RAM as standard, a figure which can be extended to 8GB with an inexpensive memory upgrade.

But alongside the Macbook Pro 17′s intimidating processing power and flexible memory, the system displays several short-sighted exclusions and strange choices. Apple’s standard Superdrive is included – a combination DVD and CD rewriter – yet we feel the 17-inch media laptop would be more comfortable sporting a full Blu-ray disc drive.

The nVidia graphics card is also a mixed bag. Despite empowering media users and transforming the Macbook Pro into a more gamer-focused machine, there’s no simple way to disable the graphics card and operate on the motherboard’s built-in graphics unit. The built-in battery is powerful enough to make long haul flights and journeys manageable, though allowing users to switch the display card off could add hours onto the system’s mobile longevity.

We feel that the Macbook Pro 17 has succeeded in all the categories which Apple are renowned for, while at the same time falling guilty to some basic software and control faux pas. A beautiful piece of hardware, the 17-inch Macbook Pro would be significantly improved by a greater degree of user control and software options.

But we also have no qualms in recommending the latest Macbook Pro, especially as an all-in-one multimedia centre. It’s expensive – unreasonably expensive for many users – but it just doesn’t matter to us. While the lack of a Blu-ray drive and a limited selection of user control options make the Macbook Pro 17 a difficult choice for techies, we’re certain that this is the best non-Windows laptop available today.

Of course the new processor installed means a boost to the speed of the performance and therefore this particular MacBook is definitely going to be much faster for you than the previous ones that you might have used. However this is not the only upgrade that you will receive with this new processor, the graphics on the Macbook also have been upgraded to suit your tastes, now the processors have their own built in HD graphics which bring about the great high definition graphics that you will find with this laptop. The whole CPU architecture of the system itself has been made powerful along with the Hyper Threading and the Turbo Boost features. Also, another significant change that you will find with this 15 inch MacBook is its nine to ten hour long wireless charge which is a significant rise and definitely an asset to the user.

The Hyper Threading feature that has been talked about before is actually also quite an asset for the laptop, this feature will actually allow two separate threads to run at the same time on the two different cores of the machine which means that the two dual chips that the Macbook contains will eventually have four virtual cores to run on. This way, the tasks that are being performed by the user will be spread out evenly and uniformly which will lead to definite fast performances. The Turbo Boost is the other feature that will work along with the machine to make sure that any of the spare power of the laptop is not waster when it is not needed. When all the cores are not being utilized, this Turbo Boost will shut down the idle ones to make sure that the task being performed is carried out in a faster fashion.

Also, the keyboard has that brilliant feature of lighting up and illuminating when the lights around might be dim, which of course you can switch off whenever you choose to if you are watching a movie with the lights off. Overall, the verdict therefore of this Apple update is that it sure is a brilliant machine, from its incredible batter life to its upgraded graphics to all the features that are packed into this one device- it is definitely value for money.