Most laptops run pretty warm when the CPU stays pegged for any length of time. The MacBook Pro is no exception. I've never felt anything approaching "pain" when touching any part of my 15" MacBook Pro, but in Apple's forums can be found some who claim to have. A recent article appeared on Staind-Online that takes a close look at the issue.

Wanting to get to the bottom of the heat issue, the author boldly disassembled his MacBook Pro to have a look at the CPU/heatsink configuration. What he found was a rather goopy and abundant application of heatsink compound to the Core Duo CPU, ATI Mobility X1600 GPU, and the Northbridge bus controller. As anyone who has ever built a PC knows, there is a particular art to the application of heatsink compound, with "thin" and "even" and "sparing" being the key terms of the process. As the photos within reveal, the application that the MacBook Pro under examination received could not be easily described as such.

Heatsink compound application aside, we have to agree with Steve Jobs. The MacBook Pro is indeed a bitchin' machine.