Who wants a cumbersome desktop PC taking up all your legroom in the home office, refusing to go on business trips and the like, when they can carry around one of the new, sexy aluminium Apple MacBooks? Answer: nobody, that’s who.
Aluminium then: great for making aircraft, trucks, blades and in some tight-wad cases, jewellery. And, as it turns out, the new Apple MacBooks. That’s the first thing you notice about the new MacBooks, anyway. It’s clad in a sexy piece of aluminium, that gives it a no-nonsense grey sheen that suits its slender design perfectly and a strength that was missing from the previous model.
Away from the design, the MacBook is available in two processor flavours: a 2GHz and a 2.4GHz model. The difference being that the 2.4GHz runs slightly faster, but also costs an extra £195 for the privilege. There’s also the option of expanding the 2GB of memory up to 4GB, and with a 160GB hard drive (expandable up to 320GB), there’s plenty of room for all your media files.
Like the previous generation, the Apple MacBook uses Sony-style Scrabble keys for the QWERTY keyboard, and in the case of the 2.4GHz model, keys that automatically light from behind in low-light conditions. It’s also hard to deny yourself the the 13.3-inch, LED-lit 1280×800-pixel screen (although it is a touch reflective) and that touchpad that mimics the multi-touch control of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
As with most Macs, this isn’t for gaming. Yes, the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor is a step up, but you won’t be putting in any marathon Quake sessions anytime soon, that’s for sure. But Apple has also squeezed in an iSight webcam, high-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi and up to five hours battery life!
The Apple MacBook is a marvel of modern engineering. It’s not 100 per cent perfect (what is?), but with the new aluminium design we zinc we’d still like to copper feel of this metallic offering from Apple.
