Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MacBook released



After the online Apple Store closing down this morning, the MacBook has landed. The biggest news is, like the Nano, it's available in black and white. All the rest is pretty much as predicted. Apple says:

What do you get when you put up to 2GHz of pure Intel Core Duo power, an iSight camera, Front Row, iLife ’06 and a 13-inch glossy widescreen display into a sleek case? More than you thought possible for less than you thought possible. Meet MacBook, starting at just £749 (UK) / €1119 (Ireland) including VAT.

£749 does sound remarkably good value for money, especially when Apple is involved. It's a little more expensive than the rock-bottom priced Core Duo Dell laptops, but then they are probably bigger, without an iSight camera built in, without Front Row and it's remote control and not made by Apple. They also don't come in black and white!

It sounds like there is a significant performance improvement over the iBook range, with the figure of 5x more powerful being quoted by Apple. Whilst that sounds extremely impressive, that figure applies to raw processing speed, so once the computer is running normal applications that will slow down as a result of all the bottlenecks.

These'll be selling like hotcakes for a long time, with people especially encouraged by the ability to dual-boot. If I had £749 rolling about at the moment, I would definitely buy one. More pictures of the new offering are available from Apple here.

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