...

Eh?, Wot? Apple... yawn....

I coudln't agree more, if their panel is a decent IPS, they could easily ramp it up to 1920x1080 on the 17", or at a bare minimum 1680x900. Anything less is a total waste of physical size.

As for the price, well: import duty and 20% vat take that £750 up to over the 1k mark. This is the RRRP not what you will pay through the chain, so I would guess this will be available for around £1150.

As with any branded machine (yes even apple....yawn....) buy the best cpu spec you can get without the faff.... you can upgrade/add memory and hard disks/ssd yourself at less than half the cost these companies normally want to charge.

Naturally this couldn't go without an Apple design comment

For one thing, Apple themselves are just copying a Braun designer from last century..

Either way, the design is better than a lot of ugly, amateur-designed, over-styled laptops are. And since Apple machines don't run windows all that well (not optimized, so they run slow and heat up more), I'm glad HP saw fit to put out a laptop with slot-loaded optical drive and a simple, (relatively) clean soap bar shape.

But: are they less noisy now? And did they put better displays back on them again?

I remember the whole sham: First, they put great displays on them, building a reputation, and then they cut cost by starting to install cheap crappy displays a short time later. That was poor. Did they really think a pair of beats headphones was going to make up for the loss of really good screens??

When I really hate something, its all these scumbag manufacturers trying to play little shell-game tricks on their customers.