InfoWorld awarded the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro its Notebook of the Year for 2006. While I wrote of it in my blog and column, I never penned an official review specifically for Apple’s new notebook, relying on my April 2006 review of the Core Duo MacBook Pro with the standard PC model bump presumption (“the previous model, only faster”), but the Core 2 Duo cut of MacBook Pro deserves its own review. MacBook Pro has evolved in a few ways that deserve note. Apple also failed to address the flaws that I’ve noted in the keyboards and touchpads in this and recent Mac notebooks, but in the end, Apple pulled off a market-beater of a 64-bit commercial notebook.Whether you’re a current Mac user or not, the 15-inch Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro is the notebook you want to carry. Its desktop replacement feature set is ideally matched to a comfortable carrying weight that otherwise qualifies Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro as a mid-class commercial notebook. It outclasses mid-class x86 notebooks in all other regards, with the standouts being 400 and 800 Mbps FireWire ports, a full-sized DVI video port for uncompromising digital output from MacBook Pro’s 256 MB AMD/ATI X1600 graphics processing unit, a brilliant display with a nice stiff hinge, a backlit keyboard and expandability to 3 GB of RAM. And then there’s OS X Tiger, a stellar application platform in its own right, Microsoft’s inspiration for Vista and yet Vista’s better in every measure but market share.The greatest shortcoming that Core Duo MacBook Pro suffered, short battery life, is entirely resolved in Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Apple managed to add 30 to 60 minutes to MacBook Pro’s running time on battery, with the size of the extra time slice determined by the portion of time you spend with the AirPort wireless transceiver turned on. I must point out as well that the Core Duo notebook I tested before this new model was a 17-inch machine with a 7,200 RPM hard drive, making it a greater consumer of current on at least a couple of scales. However, I exercised due diligence in testing Core Duo MacBook Pro’s battery life by running it at minimum brightness and with the hard disk timeout set to 1 minute. That unusual degree of frugality netted me less than three hours of running time, while I routinely pull four hours of continuous computing (no dimming, no disk spin-down, but no wireless) on the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Subjectively, heat is somewhat less of an issue as well. That’s very hard to quantify; the 17-inch Core Duo notebook’s more expansive speaker grilles and palm rests created a large hot zone that ran from the Mag Safe magnetically latched charter port and radiated down to the left palm rest. Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro can still get very warm, especially when operated on its charger (which Apple and I recommend to extend the total life expectancy of the battery). But the hot zone seems to be pushed north, concentrated at the grille concealed below the display. I have two other notebooks in Core 2 Duo’s performance class here, and both run much cooler, but at the expense of running their cooling fans very liberally. One of the competing PC notebooks also has fan intake grilles on the bottom surface, a common design trait and an insidious enemy of quiet operation.The performance of the dual-core, 64-bit Core 2 Duo CPU built into MacBook Pro needs no description, except to say that the dramatic perceived performance boost over PowerBook that some reviewers had attributed to Core Duo MacBook Pro is actually delivered by Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Applications like Microsoft Office that run under Apple’s Rosetta PowerPC translator have, in my opinion, finally achieved an acceptable level of performance without dragging the performance of native applications. This is credited not only to Apple’s new notebook CPU, but to Apple’s frequent updates to Rosetta itself.The one significant flaw of Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro is one that actually traces back to late-model PowerBooks. The last two models of PowerBook that I tested, along with two models of MacBook Pro, have had quality issues with both their keyboards and touchpads. With keyboards, I’ve had keycaps pop off, keys that go dead when the machine heats up, repeating keys, a squeaky and unbalanced spacebar and, with this latest model, a Delete key that makes one time in three or four presses. Touchpads on all of these models have intermittently wandered and clicked themselves when I rested my palms below the keyboard, a problem so pronounced in Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro that I’ve had to turn off tap-to-click. These strike me as problems that would be caught in the most cursory QA tests. They might not stand out so glaringly if Apple hadn’t set the bar for excellence in human interface devices. I offered Apple a chance to swap out the MacBook Pro review unit for the keyboard and touchpad problems. Apple did not respond, but I submitted my request a bit too close to Christmas.An honest review of Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro requires criticism for those ways in which Apple fell short of the exceptional notebook standards it set for the entire industry. But most prospective buyers of MacBook Pro have never laid hands on a PowerBook. Even in a hurried retail setting, any side-by-side comparison pitting Apple’s Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro against competing Windows notebooks with similar specifications consistently leaves one with the conviction that while Apple’s competitors can churn out interchangeable commodity (I meant to type “standardized” but my fingers wouldn’t let me) notebooks from off-the-rack innards, Apple’s from-scratch design resulted in a notebook that outclasses the mainstream. And if you need any more convincing than that, consider that Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro is Leopard-ready. Being prepped to run Apple’s next-generation OS and application platform is far more meaningful and worthy of investment than any PC bearing the “Vista-ready” tag (which was all of them). Everything that Apple has made since the G4 PowerBooks will run Leopard, but Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro will make the best possible mobile living quarters for the remade Mac software platform.Postscript: Apple is now selling an in-flight DC adapter to address the fact that at 85 watts, the standard AC-to-DC charger exceeds the 75 watt limit of under-seat power outlets. Also, touchpad difficulties are eliminated with the use of Apple’s optional wireless Mighty Mouse, which automatically links to MacBook Pro’s built-in BlueTooth transceiver. I recommend both to road warriors. Software Development