Macs have long been touted for their excellent design and ease of use, but have been knocked for their relativey high cost. With its new $999 MacBook—a slightly stripped down MacBook Pro in a plastic chassis—Apple has delivered a notebook that not only offers similar performance to its higher-end cousin, but is now price competitive with Windows 7 machines that have similar specs. Considering its long battery life—not to mention Apple’s excellent Snow Leopard operating system and first-rate customer support—the new MacBook is a strong buy. You just have to be willing to sacrifice some features.
Design
If you were to take a 13-inch MacBook Pro and replace the metal exterior with plastic, you’d pretty much have the MacBook. Its gleaming white glossy plastic interior and exterior--including the keyboard--continues the clean aesthetic of previous Macs, and hides fingerprints well, too. Like the MacBook Pros, this thin and light system also features a sturdy unibody construction. The result is a design that feels like it will stand the test of time.
While the aluminum-clad MacBook Pros with their black keyboards are definitely sleek, the all-white MacBook seems somewhat friendlier. The bottom panel, held in place by 8 screws, is coated in a soft light gray rubber, which keeps it from slipping around on a desk, and feels comfortable on your lap.
At 13.0 x 9.1 x 1.1 inches and weighing 4.7 pounds, the MacBook slightly larger and heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Pro (12.8 x 8.9 x 1.0 inches, 4.4 pounds), but isn’t too great a difference that we couldn’t carry it in our messenger bag.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Unlike the MacBook Pros, the MacBook’s keyboard is not backlit; some concessions have to be made for the price. However, that seems to be the only concession. Not only is the island-style keyboard well-spaced, but the keys themselves were comfortable to the touch, and were snappy in response.
Apple has also brought the same touchpad as on its other notebooks: it doubles as the touchpad and the touch button. At 4.0 x 3.0 inches, not only is this trackpad the largest we’ve ever tested, but is very low friction, too. Like the 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple’s honed the design: we were able to effortlessly press down on the button without thinking about the fact that there’s no dedicated touch button (nevermind two).
The multitouch gestures work smoothly, too. By pushing four fingers toward the top of the touchpad, we were able to fling windows up toward the top of the screen, exposing a clean desktop. When we used two fingers to zoom in and out of pages in Safari 4, the onscreen response was very quick. More importantly, it wasn’t jerky and finicky, like the touchpad/button combo on the HP Envy 13. We were able to rest our left thumb on the pad and still move the cursor around without the notebook misinterpreting our movements.
Display and Audio
The 13.3-inch LED-backlit matte display on the MacBook has a resolution of 1280 x 800, and images were bright and crisp. However, this system doesn’t have the same 60 percent greater color gamut as the MacBook Pro line, so photo editors will want to think twice. Vieweing angles were excellent from side to side, but the image degraded quickly when we tilted the screen forward. We didn’t see any artifacts in darker scenes when watching videos streamed from Hulu, or when we watched a DVD.
While the speakers on the MacBook were loud, producing enough sound to fill a room, they were lacking in bass. Higher sounds, such as the drums and guitar riffs in The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Gold Lion” tended to be overwhelming and somewhat harsh.
Ports and Webcam
The one area where we’d like to see Apple splurge a bit more is with its port and slot selection. The MacBook has two USB, mini DisplayPort, Ethernet, and a headphone jack on the left side; on the right is the slot for the SuperDrive DVD burner. Considering their ubiquity (you can find them on $300 netbooks), we’d prefer an SD Card slot, as well as at least one more USB port. The Dell Studio XPS 13, for example, has all of the above, as well as FireWire and HDMI.
When conversing with a friend over Google Chat, he said that our image was clear, and the embedded mic picked up our sound well, but the camera on the MacBook had a hard time adjusting to lower-light conditions.
Hands-on video with Apple's groundbreaking tablet.
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