Photo gallery: Apple MacBook 2.4GHzDesign
Rugged is a word you'd use to describe this laptop, and while we wouldn't try dropping it a metre onto concrete as per official military standards, it's certainly sturdier than any laptop Apple has produced yet. This is because the Macbook uses what the company calls a uni-body construction (not to be confused with a Unitard construction). The "CPU" is housed in a single piece of aluminium using tolerances usually only seen in aeronautics. And it feels solid — there's not as much give in the palmtop as you'd see on other notebooks.
Apart from aluminium, the other notable material in use is glass: the LCD is encased in it providing a very cinematic looking screen; and even the trackpad uses a thin layer of it providing an excellent tactile feel.
But one of the most immediately striking things about this notebook is the 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, which features a 1,280x800 resolution. Apple claims the Macbook and MacBook Pro are the world's first ranges to feature LED-backlighting as standard.
The keyboard itself uses the discrete keys seen on previous MacBooks, and they have an excellent "spring" action which is relatively quiet in use. These keys also feature backlighting which can be turned on or off, but they're also automatically activated by the notebook's ambient light sensor.
One feature we like is the battery compartment — the aluminium lid is held in place by a lever. If you use a Kensington lock on the 'book the lever is disabled, and as the compartment also houses the hard drive it makes it both more secure and easy to upgrade. To replace the RAM, though, you'll need to remove some screws, but the battery cover has simple instructions printed on it.
Features
Now down to the stats: while the MacBook has got Centrino-2-like features it's not an Intel design but Apple's own, and based on an Nvidia chipset. You get an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processor, an integrated Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphic adapter, a roomy 250GB hard drive and 2GB of DDR3 memory. For your DVD reading and burning needs there's an 8x DVD±R slot-loading SuperDrive.
The new touchpad is a star attraction on its own. It's huge. And it is also hinged, so it's now both a button and a tracking surface. With the new trackpad on both the Apple Mac and MacBook Pro come new gestures: four fingers. Stroke downwards and you get a windows chooser, and swipe sideways and you get application switching. As the whole thing is now a button, it takes more of a concerted effort to depress it on the top third of the surface, but it works quite naturally otherwise.
If you want to output to a screen it'd be a lot easier if you have one of the relative few which have a DisplayPort on-board. This is because while there are adapters to DVI and VGA available they will cost you an extra AU$45 each. If you want to run dual-DVI monitors though, you may need to sit down — the adapter for that will cost you AU$149.
When it comes to the ports, Apple users will bemoan the lack of FireWire — especially if they have a lot of FireWire peripherals. But following IEEE 1394's relative death on the PC, Apple has decided to follow suit and cut it from the roster. If this interface is important then try the MacBook Pro instead. Unfortunately there's no way to add any peripherals other than USB-compatible ones either as there's also no PCI Express port.
On the left-hand (or should it be "port") side you get the MagSafe battery port, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USBs, a mini DisplayPort, microphone port and headphone jack. There's also a very discrete wireless finder with a small button and eight indicator lights.
Performance
Given that Macs and Windows PCs now share the same hardware it's a lot easier to compare Apples with ahem … apples. Firstly, we fired up a DVD and let it run with the display at full brightness, and found that the laptop did quite well — putting in a healthy two hours 33 minutes of battery life. Considering that the laptop will only fit a six-cell battery it's comforting to know that it can outperform similarly sized notebooks like the Dell M1330 by almost 45 minutes.
For further benchmarking we installed Windows Vista Premium and ran the Futuremark suite. Given the laptop's relatively humble GeForce 9400M it put in a good score in 3DMark06, with a result of 2,138 marks. You could definitely use this for modern games, albeit at lower resolutions. General performance was also impressive, with a PCMark05 score of 4,445.
While we found the Mac experience to be one of the best ever — thanks in part to the intuitive button and the new gestures — this laptop may not be the best option if you need to use Windows heavily. This is because while the trackpad will recognise simple two-finger gestures, its support isn't as strong under the Microsoft OS. For example, we found that click and drag was quite problematic and needed to experiment with keeping only one finger on the "button" at a time. This made navigation under Vista a little twitchy and challenging.
Conclusion
Being an Apple product there is an inherent expectation — based on our previous MacBook reviews, of course — that we will give this one an Editor's Choice, but despite our initial resistance we'll admit it — this product is very good indeed.
It's obvious that Apple has put a lot of thought into the MacBook, and new features like the four-finger gestures shows that the company is pushing the usability envelope. This is our favourite Apple Mac yet.
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