Another Disappointing MacBook Upgrade

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So, the Apple Store was down for a few hours today, and the rumour sites went crazy. A possible 15.4" inch MacBook was rumoured, with LED backlighting and the latest Intel Chipset (which would have been a huge graphical update).

Unfortunately, the only bump was to CPU speeds (+0.16Ghz), minimum RAM (2x512MB), and disks (120GB). No big graphics options, matte screens, backlit keyboards, 1440x900 screens, thought-readers, etc.

UPDATE: Also upgraded: the Superdrive is now 8x, which is useful.

A quite disappointing update really, but, it does mean that the base MacBook has a 4MB shared cache and 1GB RAM, which were reasons enough to upgrade to the middle WhiteBook in the past. There's still no Superdrive in the base model, though, which is pretty poor for a laptop marketed to content creators.

Having griped that, the middle spec Whitebook is still probably the best value for money of the portApples. And now that the magsafe Airline adaptor is available on the HK store, it makes a lot of sense for me to get one. I can use my laptop while some inconsiderate twerp has reclined his seat back as far as it goes in cattle class.

Unfortunately, the crap graphics card (Intel GMA950) has about the same level of grunt as an Nvidia FX5200, which was a basic GPU four years ago. It's completely unacceptable for a modern laptop. The X1600 in the MacBookPro is just about the minimum acceptable GPU for a 2007 laptop.

UPDATE: And yet, disappointing upgrade or not, I've been thinking about it all morning. If it had had a bigger screen, or a GPU, I'd be posting this from my new notebook.

Oh well, back to trying to edit a movie on my G4 mini, which is an otherwise capable machine, but the least powerful of my computers here.

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This page contains a single entry by dave published on May 15, 2007 10:32 PM.

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