Product Listing

Apple Macbook - Pretty Pretty Please?

By Aloysius Low - 1 Jan 2009

Insides and Battery

The Insides

With its innards being the lower end of the MacBook spectrum and as such is running only a Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.0GHz with 2GB of 1066MHz DDR3 RAM. Hard disk capacity for the 2.0GHz model is limited to just 160GB, which may seem like a small amount but fret not, if you're a storage junkie, there's always external storage to rely on, and the HDD is easily accessible once you open the battery cover for upgrades. Lastly, the MacBook's graphics is powered by NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, which is part of the single-chip GeForm 9400 mGPU chipset that is powering the entire platform of the new Macbook series. When compared against the Intel integrated graphics of the older Macbook models, this is a huge boost in performance and capability for the latest Macbook in addition to power savings.

The clean surface of the back fits with the entire theme of Apple's MacBook and is extremely pleasing to the eye.

The hard disk drive is easily accessible by just lifting the battery cover.

Battery Life and Portability Index

Apple's claim of a five-hour battery life with wireless turned on notwithstanding, we set off to find out how long the MacBook will last with our own standard test suite. The result, well, Apple's five-hour claim isn't too far as we scored 3 hours and 16 minutes on our DVD test thanks to its 45 watt-hour battery. Now, if you were just doing basic office productivity, Internet surfing and other menial tasks, hitting five hours is definitely doable. Definitely a good sign of things to come, and it also does much better than the first generation MacBook Air that we've reviewed previously considering the fact that we looped a video on the hard disk as opposed to an optical drive.

Power consumption was also remarkably low, and the MacBook's result of 13.76 watts was just slightly higher than the 12.47 watts of the Air and probably explains why Apple is claiming a 5-hour battery life despite packing a weaker battery compared to the 60 watt-hour of the older models. Portability wise, the unit scored a nice respectable cool figure of 0.902 that really shows how portable this new notebook from Apple is.

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