We don’t link to just any reviews here on the Zone, but no site does reviews like Ars Technica, so when we saw their new look at the just-released Santa Rosa 17-inch MacBook Pros, we had to pass it along.

A few of the observations worth noting: if you can handle the higher-res screen, it’s worth springing for; the conventional LCD in the 17-inch model seems to have no different quality versus the 15-inch with LED LCD, though the battery life in the 15-inch model with LED LCD is significantly improved; overall performance is improved significantly by the faster FSB, but the OpenGL performance seems worse with the new NVIDIA graphics card.

We’d been told to expect some more consistent brightness and color with the LED-backlit LCDs, so it’s somewhat surprising to hear that no one can tell the difference, but most of us will probably be content to enjoy the great battery life. As for the OpenGL performance, the reviewer suspects it could be an issue with the drivers, leaving open the possibility that the performance could improve significantly with a future software update. While the review is very informative, we had to share one part that had us laughing:

If I was planning on fathering more children, I probably would be less inclined to use this as a laptop.

Filed under: MacBook Pro News