[May 16, 2006] Apple unveiled the newly designed MacBook, the world’s most advanced consumer notebook featuring the Intel Core Duo processor and a gorgeous new 13-inch glossy widescreen display, all in a sleek design that is up to five times faster than the iBook and up to four times faster than the 12-inch PowerBook. Together with the 15-and 17-inch MacBook Pros, the new MacBook completes Apple’s Intel-based portables lineup and replaces both the iBook and the 12-inch PowerBook.

Specifications:
1.83GHz or 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo, 13.3-inch (diagonal) TFT glossy widescreen display, Apple Remote with Front Row, Up to 2GB memory(3), Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, Slot-loading optical drive, Up to 120GB hard drive(3), Built-in 54-Mbps 802.11g AirPort Extreme wireless, Analog and digital audio in and out, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 ports, iLife ’06, Mac OS X Tiger

Now the Intel Core Duo is as affordable as it is powerful. With MacBook, you get the world’s fastest mobile architecture in a beautifully designed notebook that costs less than slower, clunkier models. That’s like getting a sports car for the price of a scooter. Of course, MacBook holds more than your average two-seater: up to 80GB hard drive, an optional DVD-burning SuperDrive, built-in Bluetooth, wireless-ready (802.11g) AirPort, and up to 2GB of RAM. And for the first time ever, choose bright white or sleek black.

“The 13-inch MacBook unveiled by Apple Tuesday outperformed the fastest iBook G4 in all but one of our tests and also matched up well against a PowerBook with a 1.67GHz G4 processor, according to Macworld Lab tests.

We tested two of the latest Intel-based laptops: a white MacBook with a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo chip and a black-matte laptop powered by a 2GHz dual-core processor. These laptops replace the G4-based 12-inch PowerBook as well as the entire iBook line.

Those MacBook processor speeds are the same ones that originally appeared in the MacBook Pro line. (Apple boosted the clock speeds in its higher-end laptops to 2GHz and 2.16GHz to coincide with Tuesday’s MacBook launch.) So it’s no surprise that the MacBooks held their own against the MacBook Pros on most processor-intensive tasks like Compressor, Photoshop, and Cinema 4D. The MacBooks also outperformed the G4-based laptops in these tests, with one exception—the Photoshop suite test. Adobe Photoshop CS2 has yet to appear in a Universal Binary form, so it requires Apple’s Rosetta emulation technology to run on Intel-based hardware. That creates a performance hit as the chart below indicates.” - macworld.com

“The company has corrected a handful of the iBook’s shortcomings, hit a totally reasonable price point (at least for the $1,099 baseline white model), and finally delivered a laptop with a 13.3-inch display, which I believe offers a better compromise between size and portability than any other screen size on the market. Although plenty of laptops out there start for many hundreds of dollars less than the MacBook, I believe that with the MacBook, the value gap between Apple laptops and the PC competition has narrowed significantly.” - Cnet Reviews

This entry was posted on May 18, 2006 and is filed under Apple, News.