Apple now relies on what it calls a wireless Web test that uses a script to mimic how a laptop user would surf the Web. It visits 25 top sites, watches embedded videos -- including Flash videos -- and performs searches. The same test applied to earlier laptops would have generated about the same results, meaning you're getting substantially more horsepower with the new hardware without a hit on battery life.

For my own battery test, I downloaded and installed several recent Apple updates, imported a 62.8MB movie into iMovie (then exported it as a "large" 960-by-540-pixel movie), fired up Safari to surf a variety of sites, opened iTunes and played a streaming radio station (over Wi-Fi), and worked on this review. The MacBook Pro lasted 5 hours and 1 minute before running out of power -- 2 hours short of Apple's 7-hour estimate, but still pretty good.

As for that movie file, I did the same import/export test using a Core i5-based iMac -- the 2.66GHz version that debuted late in 2009 -- and found that the MacBook Pro and the iMac performed the task in almost the same time. The iMac exported the movie in 1 minute and 5 seconds; the laptop needed 9 seconds more. (The same process took 2 minutes and 9 seconds on my older MacBook Pro.)

Next, I ran for a quick benchmark test to compare this laptop to my iMac and my older MacBook Pro. Given the different hardware configurations, it's not strictly an apples-to-apples test: The new laptop has that slow 5,400rpm hard drive; the iMac has a 3.5-in. 7,200rpm drive and my own MacBook Pro has the SSD (which can heavily skew the final results because SSDs are so much faster).

The new MacBook Pro more than held its own. It scored 218 on Xbench -- higher than I expected, given its slow hard drive. My own MacBook Pro scored 245, but its advantage came from the SSD I installed after I bought it. As for the iMac, it returned a score of 217, one point lower than the new MacBook Pro.