Mac & iPod Reviews

MacBook Review (last gen.)

Increasingly, laptops are part of our everyday lives. Consequently, they should look and feel good; be easy to carry; be capable of taking a few knocks; and have a spec that does whatever job you have in mind.

Style

When it comes to looking good, Apple’s MacBooks lead the field. Apple has opted not for a range of overblown colours but for two simple chromatic statements: white and black. The white 2.1GHz and 2.4GHz MacBooks, and the black 2.4GHz MacBook, stand out by virtue of their no-nonsense colour and elegance.

The feel good factor

The feel good factor begins the moment you open the MacBook. There’s no clumsy latch; instead the MacBook has an impressively smooth magnetic catch. This theme of smoothness and grace continues when the MacBook’s lid tucks its bottom edge behind the base and reveals a low profile keyboard with the Apple trackpad sitting in front. Most keyboards can’t help but look cluttered; the perfect colour coordination of the MacBook’s keyboard and the casing, however, combine to create a sense of harmony rather than disarray.

Portability

At just 2.27 kg (5 pounds), the MacBook is easy to lift and transport. It’s width of 32.5 cm (12.78 inches), depth of 22.7 cm (8.92 inches), and modest height of 2.75 cm (1.08 inches) also make the MacBook the perfect size to slip into a bag or set up on a table at your coffee shop.

Robustness

With a laptop, robustness must accompany good looks and compactness. Apple’s answer to this is a resilient polycarbonate casing for the MacBook that handles bangs and scrapes well, and withstands discolouration.

Battery life

The MacBook has a 55-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery that allows you to stay wireless for up to four and a half hours. If you decide to watch a film on your MacBook, you should be able to fit in two DVDs for a total of around three hours twenty minutes before you need to recharge it.

Technical spec

MacBook power begins with the 2.1GHz and 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors and their advanced Santa Rosa architecture. In other words, every MacBook has a fast, up-to-the-minute base for the rest of its technology.

This includes a more than respectable 1GB of memory with the 2.1GHz MacBook, and 2GB as standard for the 2.4GHz white and black models. The memory comes in the form of two SO-DIMMS, either two 512MB or two 1GB. You can expand the memory to 4GB by taking advantage of the two SO-DIMM slots located beneath the battery.

The basic hard drive of the 2.1GHz MacBook is 120GB but you can upgrade to 160GB or 250GB if you want more space for music, photos and videos. The white 2.4GHz MacBook has 160GB of storage, and the black 2.4GHz has 250GB.

An Intel GMA X3100 processor with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM runs the MacBook’s graphics. This is not the ideal choice for a committed gamer, but is certainly fine for the majority of users.

The graphics appear on a 13.3 inch glossy widescreen TFT display. There’s no denying the clarity and brightness of Apple’s glossy screens, but you do have to watch for reflected glare under some lighting conditions.

Software

The operating system behind the MacBook and its applications is the renowned Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard. This operating system is fast gaining a reputation as more user-friendly and smarter than Windows Vista. Nonetheless, if you want to maintain a link with Windows, Leopard has the software to help you download it. You can also use Mac versions of applications such as Microsoft Office 2008. This means that if you’re switching to a Mac from a PC, you needn’t lose any of your previous data and files

Leopard comes with the latest software from Apple that includes Time Machine, Mail, Safari, DVD Player, Photo Booth and Front Row. These give you the ability to run a complete multimedia computing life. To support this, each MacBook also contains iLife ’08 (which has iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand among others).

Performance

The laptop market is a crowded one, so even if you give thumbs up to a computer’s style and technology, you want performance that gives you an edge. If a laptop doesn’t deliver this, you simply look at one of the many other models elsewhere.

What Apple has managed to achieve with the latest MacBooks is two-fold. It has kept abreast of the latest Intel developments and generated speeds up to 58% faster than the previous MacBook generation, and it has done this without increasing the price. The result is high performance and great value, a combination that is winning over more and more people to the MacBook in today’s very competitive environment.

Conclusion

Pros

The MacBook has tremendous style
It’s great value for money
Apple pays precise attention to detail
There’s an excellent spec
The memory and hard drive are more than sufficient for most uses
You have up to four and a half battery hours of productivity

Cons

The MacBook is not so good for serious gaming