The screen is excellent. The best LCD I've ever used as far as brightness and sharpness and all over enjoyment of use. And the glass panel is part of it. But the color gamut is still subpar because of the continued 6-bit dithering. You are only seeing 250,000 colors and it shows in any gradient. When I do a gray gradient from white to black I get stripes instead of smooth color. And with the 9c98 panel that I have its tougher than most other monitors. I can usually calibrate well by eye, but no on this machine. Even a spyder3 profile gives me greys that are blue at one level of darkness and orange in another.
Ugh, I'm torn. I've kept going back and forth between the MBP 17" and a Dell Precision M6400 Covet for weeks now.
On one hand the M6400 Covet gives you an edge-to-edge LED screen with 100% Adobe color gamut, as well as optional dual HDDs with RAID config, quad-core and up to 16 GB of RAM. Plus a nifty trackpad feature that turns the trackpad into an illuminated jog/shuttle wheel you can use for stuff like navigating the timeline in Flash, After Effects etc. It has a docking port which docks with a combined port replicator and table stand, which means I'll have a clutter (=cable) free desk, tons of USB ports, and no plugging/unplugging half a dozen cablesi when I move it to and from the desk. It includes a 3-year NBD on-site support plan and I know from experience that the support is great, they stop by your house and switch out defective components so you never get more than 24 hrs downtime.
As for cons, well it's effing huge, about twice as thick as an MBP 17" and weighs a pound more. And it's ugly. Aluminium, sure, but orange? Yikes. And it only runs Windows. Personally I don't consider Windows itself a con (Win7 is shaping up to be great), the con is that I won't be able to run both OSX and Windows on it. The battery life blows, too (I'm sure it's large, but with all those desktop-grade components the power consumption is brutal). And in typical Dell fashion it has a couple of redundant legacy ports from the 1950's.
On the other hand there's the MBP 17" with its thinness and stellar design, the awesome battery, the ability to run both Snow Leopard and Win7, dual video cards, and the huge trackpad with gestures. I could partly substitute Dell's desk stand/dock with a Rain Design mStand. One less pound to lug around, too.
Cons: Single HDD, 8 GB max, no quad, no docking, and apparently some sort of 6-bit dithering crap that chops gradients into stripes. 3-year support plan costs a lot extra yet doesn't really offer anything other than basic warranty extension. No on-site service feels awkward and risky, if it breaks down I'll have to send it away for X number of days as the nearest service center is 60 miles away (no Apple stores in my country other than the online one).
Ugh, it's like choosing between a fugly, overweight girl who is amazing in bed, makes world-class food and drives her own car, and a drop-dead gorgeous supermodel who's so-so in bed, a so-so cook, and has no driver's license so you have to drive her everywhere.
