The new white MacBook was just a little more than 4 percent faster than the 2GHz Aluminum MacBook when tested using Speedmark, and proved to be faster at nearly every task. With its slower processor, its no surprise that the aluminum MacBook wasn't quite as speedy at rendering a 3D scene in Cinema 4D, or encoding a MPEG movie with Compressor, but even hard drive tests, like unzipping compressed files were a bit slower on the aluminum MacBook. The one test in which the aluminum MacBook performed better was our Quake 4 test. As both systems use 256MB of main memory, it makes sense that with the faster RAM, the aluminum MacBook would have the advantage.

The performance boost gained from jumping from MacBook to MacBook Pro is still considerable, with the entry-level 2.4GHz MacBook Pro turning in a Speedmark 5 score that was more that 10.5 percent faster than the 2.13GHz white MacBook. The biggest difference was in Quake 4 performance: with the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro's faster Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor and 256MB of dedicated GDDR3 memory, it was able to push through about 82 percent more frames per second than the white MacBook. Of course, the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro costs twice as much as the white MacBook, so one would hope to see significant differences.

In terms of battery life, we found that the white MacBook could play a QuickTime movie at full brightness for three hours and 22 minutes, 38 minutes longer than the aluminum MacBook and 28 minutes longer than the MacBook Pro, when the pro system was set to use its battery-saving lower powered graphics.

If you're in the market for an affordable Mac laptop, the white MacBook is a better bargain than ever. With its impressive performance, battery life, the inclusion of FireWire, and more common mini-DVI connector, the only reason to pay more for the low-end aluminum is the updated unibody design.