The back/bottom of the MacBook no longer has any padded feet--mostly because the entire back surface is one giant rubberized foot. It's secured by eight Philips screws. You won't find a battery compartment on the back either, since this is the first white MacBook with a built-in battery. Apple says the custom battery--which saves space in the notebook's design--offers up to seven hours of runtime and up to 1000 charge cycles. As with Apple's other unibody laptops, the battery is not user replaceable, and there's no charge status indicator either.

One thing I haven't had a chance to do yet is take the rubber back panel off to see if hard drive swapping is as easy as in the past.

The latest MacBook stills uses an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, but bumps the speed from 2.13GHz to 2.26GHz (both have 3MB of shared L2 cache). And although the MacBook maintains the same 1066MHz frontside bus, the new model supports 1066MHz DDR3 RAM as opposed to 800MHz DDR2 RAM (4GB is still the supported RAM limit). The MacBook also retains its 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless networking.

Graphics-wise, the new MacBook uses the same Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processor that shares 256MB of RAM with main memory (although, as I mentioned, the system RAM is faster). That processor still lets you mirror or extend your desktop to a second display at up to 2560 by 1600 resolution at millions of colors. You won't find any of the Mini DisplayPort adapters you'll need to connect to an external display, however, in the box. Each is sold separately by Apple.