We have it! Our patience has been severely tested by the month-long wait for this MacBook Pro 17".

We'll post updates on twitter about interesting things that we discover as we go. We'll also post interesting notes in our blog over the next few days.

Feel free to comment on specific steps as we go. If you have requests to see specific parts, we'll do our best to accommodate. There's also a discussion going in our forum.

Digg this.

Look at all the accessories you get for $2799!

• An 85-watt power adapter
• An 87 page user's manual
• Two software restore DVDs
• One small black cleaning cloth

We were half-expecting Tim Cook to jump out of the box. Didn't happen.

There is NO Mini DisplayPort adapter included. That'll be $29, please.

Physical dimensions: 0.98 x 15.47 x 10.51 inches and 6.6 pounds.

For comparison, the 15" model measures 0.95 x 14.35 x 9.82 inches and 5.5 pounds.

There's something almost spiritual about the blackness of that screen. Much to our dismay, it is not full of stars and David Bowman is nowhere to be found.

Tidbits from Apple System profiler:

• 12,820 mAh capacity. Yes, that's 12.8 AMP HOURS. Let's hope it actually lasts the 1,000 discharge cycles that Apple claims.
• Our battery already had 3 cycles on it! I wonder if the famous factory girl tested ours.
• A 2 GB DDR3 1067 MHz RAM chip is installed in each slot, as expected.
• The hard drive is a 320 GB Hitachi HTS543232L95A02 SATA drive using the NVIDIA MCP79 AHCI controller.
• The model that we bought has the 'low-end', 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB on-chip shared L2 cache.

The lower case. Apple's using wide, thin black rubber feet on the Unibody Pros, a departure from the small stubby bumpers on the Aluminum revisions.

There are ten Phillips screws around the perimeter of the lower case to remove:

• Seven 3 mm screws
• Three 14 mm screws

Apple's user manual for this computer has instructions to remove the lower case. But they got the length of one of the screws wrong. We promise to get them right in our repair guide.

The computer's serial number is engraved in the aluminum lower case, not the upper case like the other Unibody machines.

We removed the screws, and we're rotating off the lower case now.

The second picture reveals the beautiful internals. Look how huge that battery is!

Disconnecting the battery connector.

It's probably a good idea to disconnect this cable before continuing to disassemble the machine.

The second photo is removing a 2 GB DDR3 RAM chip.

To remove the hard drive, unscrew the two small Phillips screws holding the black plastic hard drive bracket to the chassis. Pull up on the white plastic tab and lift the hard drive out of the case, being careful not to strain the SATA cable.

Carefully disconnect the Serial ATA cable.