New MacBook is 'fast as all get out'

15.11.2006
A riddle: What's black or white and fast as all get out?

Answer: Apple Computer Inc.'s latest MacBook.

Announced last week, already on store shelves and measuring up well not only to its predecessor but to its big brothers in the MacBook Pro lineup, the new MacBook is an even better value than the model it replaces. With a notable speed boost from the new Core 2 Duo processor, more standard RAM and larger hard drives, the MacBook arrived just ahead of the holiday shopping season. It's as if (insert your holiday icon of choice here) had arrived early.

A prediction: Apple will sell a ton of these, an expectation not at all lost on Apple bigwigs who rushed to tout their new consumer line as soon as it was released. Yes, they readily acknowledged, they wanted to get the updated model out before the holiday shopping season. That makes sense given the upsurge in sales of Apple's laptops this year.

The MacBook in hand was offered up by Apple for review purposes, and true to form, the powers that be sent out a top-of-the-line model. Dressed in stately black, it was tricked out with a 160GB hard drive and maxed out with 2GB of RAM. If you bought it that way from the Apple store, you'd pay US$1,774 -- a fair jump from the basic black version's $1,499 price tag. And it's not that far away from the 15-in. MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,999.

That's a lot of money for a consumer machine, especially since $150 of that price is just so you can get it in black. But this is more than a mere consumer laptop. Aside from the shared graphics memory -- which is an issue only if you're heavy into gaming or planning to run Windows Vista with its high hardware requirements -- the MacBook specs are top-notch.